Multiple Individual Moralities May Trigger Violence

Chapter 5

Multiple Individual Moralities May TriggerViolenceEngaging and Disengaging Morality

5.1 “Multiple Individual” Moralities: Is “Moral

Disengagement” in the Perpetration of Inhumanities a

Reengagement of Another Morality?

An important research in the area of psychology that can enrich our perspective on

the relationship between morality and violence concerns the so-called moral disen-

gagement illustrated by Bandura (1999). The neglect of moral conduct is widespread

in moral agents: moral standards, even if previously adopted as guidelines for self-

sanctioning and to avoid self-condemnation or self-devaluation, are often contra-

vened. The moral behavior, Bandura says, is both inhibitive – refraining from certain

behaviour – and proactive – behaving according to that particular idea of humanity,

which is embedded in the adopted moral standard. Unfortunately, the activation of

the moral standard can be deactivated – that is what moral disengagement is about –

so that the alternative behavior is no longer viewed as immoral, the possible conse-

quent harm is minimized, expected positive consequences are overemphasized and

victims are devaluated in their very nature as human beings. What is important to

note from our perspective is that to “engage moral disengagement” people often

construct moral justifications of the new actions so that the conduct is made person-

ally and socially acceptable “by portraying it as serving a socially worthy or moral

purpose” (Bandura, 1999, p. 195). The redefinition of killing is an amazing example

of disengagement: shifts in destructive people’s behavior is seen in military con-

duct, where a new conduct “is achieved not by altering their personality structures,

aggressive drives or moral standards” (ibid.) Usually this justification also consists

in a legitimation of violence!

In sum, becoming violent by freeing ourselves from self-censure is much easier

that expected or imagined. In war settings, decent and ordinary people can become

“horrible violent people” and see themselves:

[. . . ] as fighting ruthless oppressors, protecting their cherished values, preserving world

peace, saving humanity from subjugation or honoring their country’s commitments.

Just war tenets were devised to specify when the use of violent force is morally justi-

fied. However, given people’s dexterous facility for justifying violent means all kinds

L. Magnani: Understanding Violence, SAPERE 1, pp. 171–233, 2011.

springerlink.com c© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011

172 5 Multiple Individual Moralities May Trigger Violence

of inhumanities get clothed in moral wrappings. Voltaire put it well when he said,

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities”. [. . . ]

When viewed from divergent perspectives the same violent acts are different things to

different people. It is often proclaimed in conflicts of power that one group’s terroris-

tic activity is another group’s liberation movement fought by heroic fighters. This is

why moral appeals against violence usually fall on deaf ears. Adversaries sanctify their

own militant actions, but condemn those of their antagonists as barbarity masquerad-

ing under a mask of outrageous moral reasoning. Each side feels morally superior to

the other (ibid.).

Ideologies, religious convictions, nationalist commitments, ethnic stereotypes,

even trivial personal needs – considered justified and ineluctable – are the main

tools for moral disengagement and guilt-avoidance.

Bandura satisfactorily illustrates other psychological “tools” for violence, often

performed with the help of amazing self-deceptive mechanisms: euphemistic label-

ing (we come back to the idea of language as a “knife” that I illustrated in chapter

two), for example assaulting actions are verbally “sanitized” and concealed through

camouflage and flagrant hypocrisy, bombing is “servicing the target”; “capital pun-

ishment is our society’s recognition of the sanctity of human life”, like a US senator

one time said, a reactor accident is a “normal aberration”, “we took care of some-

body”1 to see many other – almost, sad to say – funny examples.

Other tools are: advantageous comparison, when behavior is colored by what

it is compared with, so that reprehensible acts can be seen as righteous, terrorists

affront martyrdom thinking of the cruelties inflicted on the people they represent

and defend; displacement of responsibility, that is the minimization or obscuring

of the agentive role in the harm one causes, when for example a man kills simply

as he carries out orders, like in the case of Nazi followers and their commandants;

diffusion of responsibility (for example in group decisions or collective action –

scapegoat mechanism, no one feels responsible for the perpetrated violence, groups

tend to suppress private doubts); disregard or distortion of responsibility, thanks to

the minimization of harm or through discrediting of the evidence of harmful conse-

quences; dehumanization of the recipients of detrimental acts, i.e. when we see the

harmed creatures as “less” human than ourselves and our peers (i.e. slaves, savages,

strangers, “degenerates”, etc.) it is easier to avoid suffering personal distress and

self-condemnation; blaming one’s adversary is also another means that can assist

self-exonerative purposes (for example when we see ourselves as faultless victims

and so the adoption of harmful behaviors is seen as justified because compelled by

the circumstances).

Also bureaucratization,2 automation, and urbanization play serious roles in this

effect of dehumanization. Of course the psychological devices listed by Bandura are

often combined – in appropriate contexts – to the aim of strengthening the moral dis-

engagement of ordinary people. Moreover, as everyone clearly understands, moral

1 Cf. (Bandura, 1999) and (Baumeister, 1997, chapter ten).2 Empirical results concerning interesting relationships between moral disengagement,

work characteristics, satisfaction, and workplace harassment are illustrated in (Claybourn,

2011).

5.1 Multiple Individual” Moralities 173

disengagement is gradualistic, so that the level of ruthlessness can increase and a

high level of violence can become radical and routinized. Terrorists provide a clear

example:

The process of radicalization involves a gradual disengagement of moral sanctions

from violent conduct. It begins with prosocial efforts to change particular social poli-

cies and opposition to officials, who are intent on keeping things as they are. Embitter-

ing failures to accomplish social change and hostile confrontations with authorities and

police lead to growing disillusionment and alienation from the whole system. Escala-

tive battles culminate in terrorists’ efforts to destroy the system and its dehumanized

rulers (Bandura, 1999, p. 204).

This gradualization also operates in networks, like in the case of the death in-

dustry – tobacco, guns, weapons – where, for example, we have to cope with the

merchandizing of terrorism brought about “by unsavory individuals”: “It requires a

worldwide network of reputable, high-level members of society, who contribute to

the deathly enterprise by insulating fractionation of the operations and displacement

and diffusion of responsibility. [. . . ] By fragmenting and dispersing sub-functions

of the enterprise, the various contributors see themselves as decent, legitimate prac-

titioners of their trade rather than as parties to deathly operations. [. . . ] Such mech-

anisms operate in every day situations in which decent people routinely perform

activities that bring them profits and other benefits at injurious costs of others”

(p. 205).

Moral disengagement often occurs in a reciprocal interplay of personal, social,

and institutional influences and pressures, for example it is favored by peer mod-

eling and exposure to bad examples. Moral mediators of various types, available

“out there” in human and artificial environments, can serve moral disengagement,

providing new moral justifications and excuses. Also alcohol and various drugs are

among the most universal and familiar mediators of escaping guilt and other inhibi-

tions (Baumeister, 1997, pp. 540–542), that is, they are a useful tool for performing

evil.3

Jensen (2010) makes an interesting analysis of six “demoralizing” processes in

the context of the “adiaphoric company”. These processes create a realm of “being-

with”, in which outcomes of human interaction are evaluated on rational grounds,

and whether or not a particular action should be undertaken in accordance with stip-

ulated ethical rules. Unfortunately the realm of “being-for”, in which individuals

are supported to take increased responsibility, is marginalized. The author concludes

that not only does the process of disengaging morality systematically produce moral

distance between humans, which weakens individual spontaneous outbursts of sym-

pathy to take increased moral responsibility, but it also promises to release indi-

viduals from their moral ambivalence by declaring organized action to be morally

indifferent. Organizational action reengages another morality (de facto the new, so

to say, amazing “Nietzschean” company ethics) which appears evil in the light of

3 The prototypical kind of moral disengagement by indifference to harmful realities such as

ecological problems and population growth is also clearly described by Bandura in (2007).


many common moralities because – pathetically – it depicts itself as something

“adiaphoric”, beyond good and evil.

I would like to address a mild criticism to Bandura’s thesis. The reader should

agree that his analysis is extremely useful to understand moral human fragility and

the variability of human reactions, in cases where the agent is still perfectly aware

of the abstract moral rules he previously endorsed and then no longer applies. As

I have illustrated above, Bandura lists “reasons” which explain the disengagement:

are we sure that those reasons are just “extra-moral” or “immoral” triggers for dis-

engagement, at least from the perspective of the agent itself, if not of course from

our own or Bandura’s perspective of observers and judges? I hypothesize that moral

disengagement is basically a reengagement of another morality. I will address this

problem in detail very soon, in the following section.

Baumeister (1997, pp. 276–277) usefully notes that various moral subcultures of

the irresistible impulse constitute a way of favoring and justifying many violent acts.

It is well-known that these subcultures are more or less widespread and implicitly

disseminated by mass media and pseudo-moralistic gossip. It is a subcultural con-

struction that amazingly extends the range of irresistible impulses beyond the area

of biological necessities. Of course the urge to urinate can become irresistible, but

unfortunately a kind of perverse social pedagogy teaches ordinary people they “can

allow themselves to lose control of angry, violent impulses”, even if biological needs

are not at stake, thus encouraging violence:

[. . . ] people know just how much they can allow themselves to lose control. Yet that

point is not firmly determined by natural law; rather, it is influenced by cultural beliefs.

This is where the theory of a subculture of violence needs to be revised. It is not that

cultures place a positive value on violence but that culture dictates when and where

(and how much) it is appropriate to lose control. [. . . ] A culture of violence does not

have to place a positive value on violence. It can encourage violence merely by making

appropriate to let oneself go in response to a broad range of provocations (p. 276).

It seems we are dealing with a kind of sub-morality which represents the exact

inversion of Stoic morality, massively devoted to teaching the control of impulses

and the importance of moral “indifference” when faced with puzzling or dangerous

events and situations. Stoically, we should be indifferent to avoid being provoked by

those situations into acting inconsiderately. Ordinary decent people learn to morally

treat many impulses as if they were irresistible, as if they were biological needs,

even when they are not. And these impulses quickly legitimate a disengagement of

morality, or, better – as I will explain soon – a reengagement of another morality, in

this case the sub-morality of the “irresistible impulse”.

Further insight on the so called “Lucifer effect” is provided by Zimbardo (2009).

The notable book is a treatise about the malleability of human nature and the rapid-

ity of its shifts – so to say – from civility to malevolence, that is from a standard

morality (Bandura is expressly quoted in the book) to what I think is another moral

framework rather than a disengaged one. The book also takes advantage both of the

empirical results of the Stanford Prison Experiment – paralleling this experiment to


the case of the Abu Ghraib atrocities – which illustrates the overriding “power

of the situation”. The analysis permits the author to contrast the account of vi-

olence in terms of dispositions, which would transmute decent people into evil-

doers: an account that is basically ascribed to the Bible of the Inquisition, the

Malleus Maleficarum.

Recent research into the relationship between war and morality adopt a new op-

tion, which can be usefully seen in the perspective of moral disengagement and of

reengagement of morality. McMahan (2009) contends that common sense beliefs

about the morality of killing in war are deeply mistaken. The predominant view is

that in a state of war, the act of killing is ruled by different moral principles from

those that rule acts of killing in other contexts, that is for self-defense: “This pre-

supposes that it can make a difference to the moral permissibility of killing another

person whether one’s political leaders have declared a state of war with that person’s

country. According to the prevailing view, therefore, political leaders can sometimes

cause other people’s moral rights to disappear simply by commanding their armies

to attack them. When stated in this way, the received view seems obviously ab-

surd” (p. vii). Hence no disengagement of morality is legitimate, and there is now

a reengaged “war morality”. This contention clearly and provocatively shows how

war disentangles common morality and pretends to implement a new one. Many

war events can be usefully reinterpreted. The author certainly considers American

participation in World War II justifiable, but also remarks:

It is revealing about our attitudes in general that we sometimes do take combatants who

have committed war crimes to be fully excused, or even justified, and not just in cases

involving extreme duress, invincible ignorance, or insanity. Perhaps the most notorious

case of this sort is that of General Paul Tibbets, who was the commander and pilot of

the Enola Gay, the plane, named for his mother, from which the atomic bomb was

dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima in August of 1945. According to the US

Department of Energy, approximately 70,000 people were killed immediately, while

more than 30,000 more died over the next few months from injuries and exposure to

radiation. [. . . ] This single act by Tibbets, with contributions by the other members

of his small crew, had as an immediate physical effect the killing of more people, the

vast majority of whom were civilians, than any other single act ever done. The law of

war prohibits – and prohibited at the time of Tibbets’ action – the intentional killing of

civilians for the purpose of coercing their government to surrender. And all plausible

moral theories, including even the most radical forms of consequentialism, prohibit

the intentional killing of that many innocent people in virtually all practically possible

circumstances. Tibbets’ act is therefore the most egregious war crime, and the most

destructive single terrorist act, ever committed, even though it was committed in the

course of a just war. Yet he was congratulated for it by President Truman, who had

given the order that he do it, and was awarded various medals and promoted from

colonel to brigadier general. When Tibbets died in 2007 at the age of 92, the obituary

in the New York Times carried a caption in bold type that read “A war hero who never

wavered in defending his mission”, and ten days later the same newspaper printed a

further celebratory op-ed piece with this caption: “Paul Tibbets, the hero we wanted to

forget” (pp. 128-129).


5.1.1 Reengagement of Another Morality

I strongly contend that very often the agent’s disengagement of adopted and well-

known moral rules is simply due to a shift to another moral framework, that prevails

over the first one. Let me make an example, imagine a mentally healthy husband

endowed with a moral catholic education who knows perfectly well that, on that

moral basis, he must respect his wife and consequently he also acknowledges the

consequence that he must not beat her. Unfortunately, in certain circumstances, he

disengages his own moral principles and beats the wife and, at the same time, he

also thinks he has done the right thing. I think that in this case the disengagement

if due to a sudden moral change of perspective, for example we can hypothesize he

“also” shares a patriarchal morality as a more or less conscious sub-morality, where

the violent action is considered the right punishment when some of its prohibitions

are infringed.4

I have already mentioned the “scapegoat” case of mobbing behaviors, that we

can witness in widespread patriarchal behavior all over the world: it is a moral per-

formance that is often partially unconsciously and spontaneously activated. In this

case it is also easy to understand how it can be implicitly “learned” in infancy and

still implicitly “pre-wired” in an individual’s ideological cultural unconscious that

we collectively share with other human beings. In sum, disengagement of morality

is often a reengagement of another morality. As a matter of fact, people who observe

the subject’s newly adopted morality usually consider the new behavior as immoral

and certainly more violent than the previous one, but this is not the interpretation

given to the newly triggered violent actions by the agent himself. He still sees the

new behavior as justified and right: the possible violence involved does not matter,

it is perceived as ineluctable and very often not even perceived as such – the vio-

lence is only perceived by the victims and by some observers. It is likely that some

observers – who share that same sub-morality – can easily consider that punishment

appropriate, disregarding at the same time the subsequent violence. Again, this case

sheds further light on what I called the basic equivalence between engagement of

morality and engagement of violence, amazingly almost always hidden from the

awareness of those very individual agents who perpetrate the violence.

The “altruistic lying” (studied in the case of romantic relationships by Kaplan

and Gordon (2004)) is really interesting in the perspective of moral disengagement

and of the interplay between morality and violence. Liars can construe their be-

havior as altruistically motivated and this case of course “applies more broadly to

other types of transgressions in many different contexts and in varying degrees of

severity”. Indeed, the same underlying processes that operate during common inter-

personal transgressions (like in the case of many lies) may help explain how more

complicated transgressions can be interpreted as morally correct by the people who

commit them. Often these kinds of liars take advantage of cross-perspective recall,

insight, and empathy to avoid the masquerade of altruism: “[. . . ] one’s perspective

is likely to be associated with a host of powerful retrieval cues that lead people to

4 The same case here illustrated can be seen in the perspective of a psychoanalytical analysis

concerning the so-called “structure of evil”, as I will illustrate below in subsection 5.3.5.


recall previous instances in which they were in the same, rather than the opposite

role. For example, lie receivers’ feelings of anger, upset, and mistreatment may be

enhanced because their current situation activates previous instances in which they

were lied to” (p. 503). Another important constraint, that favors the moral justifica-

tion process of altruistic liars, is constituted by the cognitive and affective demands

of the situation at stake. This urgency may deplete the resources necessary for a

consideration of the situation from another perspective.

McKinlay and McVittle (2008, pp. 163–171) illustrate how many violent offend-

ers (for example in the case of rudeness or bullying) depict themselves as morally

decent, for example contending that the victim was responsible for the aggressor’s

action: the aggressor’s personal responsibility is abandoned and of course an imme-

diate conflict arises, because (usually) the witnesses’ account is considered in order

to attribute responsibility to the aggressor. The aggressor often disguises violence

simply denying that aggression took place, as in many cases of sexual abuse and

homophobic bullying, in which violence is morally understood by the subjects as

a good and just part of an exaggerated masculine identity (often male victims are

suitably feminized to favor a justification for harming them).5

Another recent research by Kimhi and Sagy (2008) examines moral justification

as a mediating mechanism for stress, used by Israeli conscripts who had served at

army roadblocks in the West Bank. The study uses Bandura’s model of moral dis-

engagement and establishes that the greater the justification needed by the soldier to

make roadblocks acceptable (be it a cognitive one, such as right-wing political atti-

tudes and religious orientations, affective or behavioral, i.e. long service), the more

he would feel adjusted to army demands, and he would see war goals with more

clarity and acceptability. The results partially support the hypothesis concerning as-

sociation between moral justification and feelings of adjustment at the end of army

service.6

Furthermore, Goldman (2010) has stressed the fragility of moral deliberation tak-

ing advantage of the concept of “partial amorality”, when for example we subtract

ourselves to a moral requirement we had agreed with, for example not to eat meat

for a certain reason. He also points out the role of weakness of will (akrasia) in

moral deliberation and the importance of addressing ethics from a practical and not

merely theoretical perspective, reaching skeptical conclusions which are certainly

in tune with the philosophical perspective I am trying to promote in this book (even

if I am even more skeptical than he is):

But all this simply assumes moral motivation on the part of ourselves and others with

whom we engage in moral dialogue. It is because we assume such motivation that we

deliberate and argue about moral matters. And the noncynical view is that this assump-

tion is justified and correct most of the time. But it remains an assumption. When it

is correct, when people are morally concerned, they may well be rationally required

to translate such concern into action or forbearance. But the fact that we assume a

5 For further details on this issue cf. also (Lines, 2008).6 Recent research provides explanation on how in-group membership would offer absolution

and justification for acts of “good violence”, which are perceived by soldiers to clearly

contrast with the enemy’s “bad violence” (Alpher and Rothbart, 2006).


capacity to respond to moral reasons when we argue with, advise, or hold others ac-

countable does not show that such motivation is rationally required. In fact, we do need

to train, socially condition, or educate people to be morally motivated, and the training

is not primarily through argument. If it were simply a matter of replacing ignorance

with knowledge, the social problem of immorality would be far more tractable, simi-

lar to that of illiteracy. And if it were only a matter of showing people how to avoid

defeating the aims they really desire, it would again be a more tractable problem. But

our deepest social problems result from the fact that moral indoctrination is only partly

successful. The defect that must be remedied is not a defect in intellect or rationality,

or a matter of ignorance. Sociopaths need not be fools or even philosophically unso-

phisticated. Nor do they have to struggle to overcome their rationally required moral

motivations (p. 16).

I have to add that also in the case of illiteracy we faced a kind of disillusionment:

the wide offer of education in Western countries, favored by the welfare state of the

last decades, has demonstrated how difficult it is even to secure stable degrees of

simple alphabetization as a definitive premise for changes in society, if only from

the mere perspective of a simple cognitive efficiency of its members.

Moreover, the case of moral disengagement also illustrates the role played in it

by the “moral bubble” effect which I have described in chapter three. The “em-

bubblement” renders invisible and condones both the disengaged (or “reengaged”)

morality and the related violence. The disengagers are entrapped in a moral bubble,

which systematically disguises their violence to themselves: as I have already said,

this concept is also of help in analyzing and explaining why so many kinds of violent

behavior in the world today are treated by the observers as if they were something

else, for example as pure – unexplainable, unmotivated – evil. Lack of awareness of

our disengagement of morality – or reengagement of another moral framework – is

very often accompanied by lack of awareness of the deceptive/aggressive character

of consequent verbal interactions (and behaviors), because the new moral assump-

tions which motivate violence and punishment are rarely seen and acknowledged as

actually “violent”.

Furthermore, moral disengagement/reengagement explains the reason why peo-

ple justify violence and cruelty by derogation and dehumanization. An interesting

appendix to moral disengagement/reengagement worth citing is provided by the the-

ory of cognitive dissonance first introduced by Leon Festinger (1957). Basically,

cognitive dissonance is a state of tension occurring when a person has two cog-

nitions – that can be beliefs, opinions, moral judgments, and so on – that are felt

as incoherent or inconsistent (Tavris and Aronson, 2008). Dissonance creates an ir-

ritation that needs to be settled down and then solved somehow by establishing a

new belief or judgment able to accommodate the inconsistency between the two

cognitions. The state of tension is therefore solved by resorting to self-justification,

which contributes to restoring coherency in one’s beliefs system. Cognitive disso-

nance may favor self-deception, and other cognitive biases that are ego-busting like,

for instance, distorting memories of past events, softening our responsibilities, and

so on.


As just mentioned, this engine of self-justification may also have extremely neg-

ative consequences on the perception of our own violent acts and thoughts, thus

creating an escalating spiral of violence and hatred. As cognitive dissonance theory

predicts, when engaging in a violent act, one may feel the urge to justify it. If cog-

nitive dissonance is solved in favor of softening one’s responsibility, then the self-

justifying explanation will work like evidence confirming and validating that the

violent action was due and that the victim deserved it. Therefore, the cognitive dis-

sonance is reduced, and the person that has committed the violent act paradoxically

becomes more certain in his conviction that he was right. In the case of violence

generated by the moral shift due to cognitive dissonance, the aggressor may for ex-

ample even persuade himself into thinking that his victim should be further punished

generating a dangerous loop of positive feedback, in which the new adopted moral

perspective, that triggered the original violence, begs for further justification that in

turn begs for more violence.7 We can add that this situation of dissonance reduction

and violence activation reminds us of the scapegoat mechanism illustrated above at

page 54, following Girard’s perspective: we can guess that the final target of the

aggressor is the brutal elimination of the victim to the aim of reducing the appetite

for violence that had possessed her just a moment before. Violence just reduces the

appetite, but does not extinguish it, violence has to be repeated just to feel it has

actually reduced.

A further note on the ambiguous status of moral engagement and disengagement

relates to the problem of the epistemic status of moral responsibility of wrongful acts.

Following Sher (2000) it also seems necessary to contemplate the role of the epistemic

conditions of these acts, and not only of the mere awareness of the agent. Indeed Sher

criticizes the inclination – I have already illustrated – to center the epistemic condition

of morally wrongful acts exclusively on conscious awareness. The book challenges

this view, called the“searchlight view”, by contending that the agent is responsible

when, and because, his failure to respond to his reasons for believing that he is acting

wrongly or foolishly has its origins in the same constitutive psychology that generally

does render him reason-responsive. In this wide perspective, for example, “ignorant”

wrongdoing – and thus moral responsibility – can nevertheless be attributed to the

7 Interestingly, Wong and colleagues (2008) argued that a stronger escalating tendency might

be triggered by a serious commitment to a rational thinking style. Rational thinking style

is characterized by a number of elements including, for instance, a conscious and analyti-

cal attitude towards problem-solving in which emotional interference is usually minimized

(Pacini and Epstein, 1999). The idea developed by Wong and colleagues is that those peo-

ple who rely on rational thinking style might be escalating their commitment towards an

idea or course of action, as they usually display stronger commitment towards their be-

liefs. Their thinking style, leaning on analysis instead of free reasoning, makes them more

confident about their abilities and their ideas and beliefs, and thus less eager to abandon

them. What is implicit here is that they seem to perceive, and subsequently exploit, the vi-

olent and aggressive element that more reasoned dispositions still possess. Such a violent

and aggressive dimension tacitly embedded in a rational thinking style serves the purpose

of reducing cognitive dissonance. That is, cognitive dissonance is reduced by means of

transferring violence delivered by a rational thinking style directly to one’s beliefs in order

to suppress dissonance. Quite literally, that would happen like grasping a knife.


agent as long as it is accounted for by the agent’s own “constitutive attitudes, dis-

positions, and traits” (p. 87). Lost of self-control, conflicting obligations (where for

example the agent is in front of the choice of a possible wrong or of a definite wrong),

the urgency of acting here and now (which triggers confused mental states), emotional

distress, are all extremely knowledge-sensitive situations. In these cases the lack of

knowledge – conceptual, emotional, manipulatory – or the incapacity to recover and

exploit the suitable knowledge is a way of facilitating crime and violence.

5.1.2 Kant and the “Inverted Stoicism”

I think Immanuel Kant provides some observations that are of precious help in fur-

ther understanding the concepts of disengagement and reengagement of morality,

also related to the notion of moral bubble I have introduced in chapter three, section

3.2.2. Kant thoughtfully says:

The human being (even the worst) does not repudiate the moral law, whatever his

maxims, in rebellious attitude (by revoking obedience to it). [. . . ] He is, however, also

dependent on the incentives of his sensuous nature because of his equally innocent

natural predisposition, and he incorporates them too into his maxim (according to the

subjective principle of self-love). If he took them into his maxim as of themselves

sufficient for the determination of his power of choice, without minding the moral law

(which he nonetheless has within himself), he would then become morally evil. But,

now since he naturally incorporates both into the same maxim, whereas he would find

each, taken alone, of itself sufficient to determine the will, so, if the difference between

the maxims depended simply on the difference between incentives (the material of the

maxims), namely, on whether the law or the sense impulse provides the incentive, he

would be morally good and evil at the same time – and this is a contradiction (as we

saw in the introduction). Hence the difference, whether the human being is good or

evil, must not lie in the difference between the incentives that he incorporates into his

maxim (not in the material of the maxim) but in their subordination (in the form of

the maxim): which of the two he makes the condition of the other. If follows that the

human being (even the best) is evil only because he reverses the moral order of his

incentives in incorporating them into the maxims (1998b, pp. 58–59).

So to say, there is a kind of slippery-slope process of continuous disengagement

of morality (the maxim), thanks to its subordination to human “sensuous nature”.

This subordination actually governs man’s “power of choice” and, I can add, quickly

appears to the decisional agent as a new reengaged framework which is still and

sincerely felt as really “moral”, as if it would be due to the maxim.

Kant is even clearer in describing the corruption of morality (in our term its

continuous “disengagement/reengagement”):

He indeed incorporates the moral law into those maxims, together with the law of

self-love; since, however, he realizes that the two cannot stand on an equal footing, but

one must be subordinated to the other as its supreme condition, he makes the incentives


of self-love and their inclinations the condition of compliance with the moral law –

whereas it is this latter that, as the supreme condition of the satisfaction of the former,

should have been incorporated into the universal maxim of the power of choice as the

sole incentive (1998b, p. 59).

The propensity to this “inversion” – like Kant says – of the moral order is a natural

propensity to evil, and it is even in itself “morally evil”, radical: not a mere “malice”

but a “perversity of the heart”. The consequences for the perception of “guilt” on

the part of the human agent reproduce both i) the problem of “moral bubbles”, I

have introduced in chapter three, and ii) the disengagement of morality I discussed

above.

The moral agent falls into a perfidious and self-deceitful reengagement in a new

decisional framework where evil is simply supposed to be good, and so morally

justified (that is, it is exactly a reengagement of another morality, to use the term I

introduced above, or in a sub-morality, to use the term I introduced when illustrating

the logic of the “irresistible impulse”. I also noted that in this case we face with a

kind of “inverted Stoicism” and Kant too speaks of a similar “inversion” of moral

order):

The innate guilt (reatus) [. . . ] can be judged in its first two stages (those of frailty and

impurity) to be unintentional guilt (culpa): in the third, however, as deliberate guilt

(dolus), and is characterized by a certain perfidy on the part of the human heart (dolus

malus) in deceiving itself as regards its own good or evil disposition and, provided that

its actions do not result in evil (which they could well do because of their maxims), in

not troubling itself on account of its disposition but rather considering itself justified

before the law (ibid.)

Furthermore, the moral agent falls into a perfidious moral bubble, where the evil

is not perceived:

This is how so many human beings (conscientious in their own estimation) derive their

peace of mind when, in course of actions in which the law was not consulted or at least

did not count the most, they just luckily slipped by the evil consequences; and [how

they derive] even the fancy that they deserve not to feel guilty of such transgressions

as they see other burdened with, without however inquiring whether the credit goes

perhaps to good luck, or whether, on the attitude of mind they could well discover

within themselves, they would not have practiced similar vices themselves, had they

not been kept away from them by impotence, temperament, upbringing, and tempting

circumstances of time and place (things which, one and all, cannot be imputed to us)

(p. 60).

In sum, Kant eloquently concludes “This dishonesty, by which we throw dust in

our own eyes and which hinders the establishment in us of a genuine moral dispo-

sition, then extends itself also externally, to falsity or deception of others. And this

dishonesty is not to be called malice, it nonetheless deserves at least the name of

unworthiness” (pp. 60–61).8

8 The recent meta-ethical intricate discussion about the positive or negative role of self-

interest in morality is illustrated in (Bloomfield, 2008).


5.2 Pure Evil?

I have just illustrated that Kant hypothesizes that an “immoral” human being practi-

cally does not exist. Let us repeat the quotation: “The human being (even the worst)

does not repudiate the moral law, whatever his maxims, in rebellious attitude (by

revoking obedience to it). The law rather imposes itself on him irresistibly, because

of his moral predispositions, and if no other incentive were at work against it, he

would also incorporate it into his supreme maxim as sufficient determination of his

power of choice, i.e. he would be morally good” (1998b, p. 58): it is in this sense

that it seems hardly acceptable that human beings are involved in what many au-

thors (for example Baumeister (1997)) call “pure evil”. The prototypes of human

evil involve actions that intentionally harm other people thanks to a transgression

of a moral rule perfectly present and approved in the agent’s mind. On the contrary,

various processes of moral disengagement and moral reengagement are usually at

play, a kind of dynamic which is implicitly addressed by the Kantian words I quoted

in the previous section and I cite again here: “This is how so many human beings

(conscientious in their own estimation) derive their peace of mind when, in course

of actions in which the law was not consulted or at least did not count the most,

they just luckily slipped by the evil consequences; and [how they derive] even the

fancy that they deserve not to feel guilty of such transgressions as they see other

burdened with, without however inquiring whether the credit well discover within

themselves, had they not been kept away from them by impotence, temperament,

upbringing, and tempting circumstances of time and place (things which, one and

all, cannot be imputed to us)” (Kant, 1998b, p. 60).

I think the postulation of the existence of an immoral human being, a true “pure

evil”, is a strong intellectual and moralistic idealization, which abstractly sees evil

perpetrators as cunning, wicked, malicious, sadistic people who inflict senseless

harm on innocent and weak victims. Actual violence perpetrators, ordinary – rarely

mentally or physically ill – human beings, often see themselves, embedded in their

“moral bubbles” as totally or abundantly justified, for example when they respond

to the real or imaginary offensive attack from their victims. In this case the vi-

olence/evil the victims will suffer exists primarily only in the experience of the

victim.

Contrarily to this perspective a classical and useful study on the problem of evil

people is provided by Haybron (2002), where the main concern is to argue in favor

of a robust bad/evil distinction, to avoid the conflation of evil persons with evildoers,

and that we usually explain and understand the evil action in terms of its relation to

evil character. He proposes an affective-motivational account of evil character, as a

significant moral category, which marks just one end of a moral continuum that has,

at the opposite pole, the saint. He maintains that “frequent evildoing” accounts con-

fuse this moral space (labeled as “aretaic”) with the one defined by the moral hero

and the moral criminal (“mirror thesis”): “[. . . ] the evil person is beyond ordinary

moral criticism and dialogue: he has no better nature to which we can appeal. Moral-

ity has no significant foothold in him. He is arguably beyond redemption through

rational deliberation; nothing short of a conversion or reprogramming, it seems,

5.2 Pure Evil? 183

could rehabilitate him. He understands morality, and may be perfectly capable of

moral decency, but he rarely if ever exercises this capacity. Because of this, the evil

person is also beyond society: a moral exile. [. . . ] The evil person is something of

an alien, lying somewhere between the human and the demonic. We call her, not

coincidentally, a monster” (p. 279). The aim of such a thesis must not be misun-

derstood: Haybron does not mean that evildoers are moral monsters, conversely, he

means to stress how the utterly, intrinsically evil individual is as rare and hard to ap-

prehend as a monstrum, just as it is hard to find a person who is a complete saint. No

matter how trivial this may sound, it is important to bear in mind that from a moral

point of view, much of our everyday “badness” falls within these two limits, whose

theoretical pregnancy is necessary but does not imply actual possibility (apart from

mythologies and theological accounts).

A list of the major aspects of the myth of pure evil are the following:9 1) evil in-

volves the intentional infliction of harm to people; 2) evil is driven primarily by the

wish to inflict harm merely for the pleasure of doing so; 3) the victim is innocent and

good; 4) evil is the other, the outsider, the out-group; 5) evil has been that way since

time immemorial; 6) evil represents the antithesis of order, peace, and stability; 7)

evil characters are often marked by egotism; 8) evil figures have difficulty main-

taining control over their feelings, especially rage and anger; 9) evil violent people

tend to have highly favorable moral opinions of themselves (unfortunately, there is

evidence that low self-esteem is the major cause of violence: threatened egotism –

especially when directed to insecure people – is at the roots of a lot of violence and

of violent revenge).10

Finally, also the tragic character of human action can accentuate the limits of

our everyday conception of evil and, at the same time, of our moral and legal con-

ceptions of evil responsibility, which focus on individual agency and guilt, seen as

absolute. There is a gap between the structure of human action and the way we

usually ascribe moral responsibility: the problem of structural violence which I il-

lustrated in chapter one furnishes an eloquent example of the difficulty of ascribing

complete moral responsibility to individuals. Following Kierkegaard’s understand-

ing of tragic action, and taking advantage of contemporary discourse on moral luck,

poetic justice, and relational responsibility, Coeckelbergh (2010) argues in favor of

an epistemologically richer reform of our legal practices based on a less “harsh”

(Kierkegaard) idea of moral and legal responsibility and directed more towards

an empathic understanding based on the emotional and imaginative evaluation of

personal narratives. Rejecting the fatalistic conception of tragedy he ascribes to

9 (Baumeister, 1997, pp. 72–74).10 A further skeptical note on the “myth of pure evil” is provided by Russell (2010, p. 45),

who stresses, drawing on the book by Cole The Myth of Pure Evil (2006), that even if the

concept of evil has the requisite form to be explanatorily useful, it will be of no explanatory

use in the real world. Indeed Russell contends that the concept of evil implies an unrealis-

tically dualistic worldview, with purely evil people on one side and ordinary people on the

other, but he also admits that: “[. . . ] even if we accept Cole’s claim that no actual person

is thoroughly or innately bad, it still seems very likely that some actual persons are evil,

and hence that evil can be an explanatorily useful concept.”


Nietzsche and Heidegger, and recovering Kierkegaard’s interpretation, he recog-

nizes that the tragic does not necessarily imply that one has to accept fate, but rather

the tragic aspects of human actions that can be characterized as follows:

[. . . ] there is luck in the way things turn out, luck in the circumstances in which one

finds oneself, luck in the traits one has, influenced by social-environmental factors, and

luck in the way one is determined by antecedent circumstances (Nagel, 1979). There

is no reason why we should suppose that the actions of anyone judged in court should

be regarded in a different way than the actions of other people. Many “crimes” might

have turned out differently, circumstances might have been different, one might have

had a different upbringing, and so on. These factors may not “excuse”, that is, relieve

one of all responsibility. But these factors should be taken into account not only when

determining punishment, but also when determining moral responsibility or legal guilt.

And of course, the degree to which one is constrained by these factors might differ, for

instance in the case of people who are said to be mentally ill. But this supports viewing

their and our responsibility as a matter of degree; it does not justify ascribing absolute

guilt or declaring them absolutely morally incompetent (pp. 236–237).

In sum, human actions (and human wrongdoing) are always “in between” the two

poles of complete passivity and absolute activity: “just as the action in Greek tragedy

is intermediate between activity and passivity (action and suffering), so is also the

hero’s guilt, and therein lies the tragic collision. [. . . ] The tragedy lies between these

two extremes. If the individual is considered as entirely without guilt, then the tragic

interest is nullified [. . . ]; if, on the other hand, he is considered as absolutely guilty,

he can no longer interest us tragically” (Kierkegaard, 1944, p. 117). The suggestion

is that this intellectual awareness may help our societies and communities to better

cope with unacceptable deeds by individuals who are neither criminals nor patients,

to make room for praise as well as blame and punishment, and to set up practices

and institutions that do not completely rely on a plain conception of responsibility

that is hard to bear for human beings.

5.2.1 Criminal Psychopaths’ Morality and Ethicocentrism

I have contended in this book that human beings live with moralities of various

kinds, and possess and adopt various moral frameworks (e.g. religious, civil, per-

sonal, emotional, etc., not to mention their intersections and intertwining) which

they engage and disengage both intentionally and unintentionally, in a strict

interplay between morality and violence. There are also private moralities and

habits – perceived as fully moral by the agents themselves, which we can call

pseudo-moralities if we compare them to the translucency of the modern moral

frameworks, as they are usually described in books about moral philosophy

(Kantian, utilitarian, religious, ethics of virtues, feminist ethics, and so on). These

personal moralities can be very easily observed not only as the fruit of the emergence

of archaic moral templates of behavior in mentally healthy human

beings – that is, templates of possible moral behavior trapped in a kind of hid-

den moral collective unconscious – but also in the case of violent psychopaths, who

5.2 Pure Evil? 185

suffer from a personality disorder involving a profound lack of empathy and re-

morse, shallow affect and poor behavioral controls:11 psychiatrists and criminolo-

gists usually describe how extremely personal – often disguised, fragmented, and

depraved – concerns and convictions, which are envisaged as “moral” in the subjec-

tive estimation of criminal psychopaths, are capable of triggering atrocious violence.

Kent Kiehl, a psychologist who focuses his research on the clinical neuroscience

of major mental illnesses (with special attention to criminal psychopathy, substance

abuse, and psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia), usefully observes that psy-

chopathy immediately affects morality:

Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterized by a profound lack of empathy

and guilt or remorse, shallow affect, irresponsibility, and poor behavioral controls.

The psychopaths’ behavioral repertoire has long led clinicians to suggest that they are

“without conscience” (Hare, 1993). Indeed, Pinel (1801), who is credited with first

identifying the condition, used the expression “madness without delirium” to denote

the lack of morality and behavioral control in these individuals, which occurred de-

spite the absence of any psychotic symptoms or defects in intellectual function. Thus,

the psychopath presents clinically as a “walking oxymoron”. On the one hand, the

psychopath is capable of articulating socially constructive, even morally appropriate,

responses to real-life situations. It is as if the moment they leave the clinician’s office,

their moral compass goes awry and they fail seriously in most life situations (2008, p.

119).

I must immediately stress that when Kiehl says that criminal psychopaths present

a “lack of morality”, I prefer to suggest that they display a lack of our morality: the

ethicocentric morality12 of a civil, cultivated observer. It seems that the criminal

psychopaths’ acts result inconsistent with their verbal reports, like in the following

case, still illustrated by Kiehl:

I was working with a psychopath who had been convicted of killing his long-term

girlfriend. During his narrative of the crime he indicated that the trigger that set him

off was that she called him “fat, bald, and broke”. After her insult registered, he went

into the bathroom where she was drawing a bath and pushed her hard into the tile wall.

She fell dazed into the half-full bathtub. He then held her under the water until she

stopped moving. He wrapped her up in a blanket, put her in the car, drove to a deserted

bridge, and threw her off. Her body was recovered under the bridge several days later

by some railroad workers. When asked if what he had done was wrong, he said that he

knew it was a bad idea to throw her off the bridge. When I probed further, he said that

he realized that it was bad to actually kill her. This inmate was subsequently released

from prison and then convicted of killing his next girlfriend. When I met up with him

in the prison some years later, he indicated that his second girlfriend had “found new

buttons to push”. He was able to admit that he knew it was wrong to kill them.

11 The publication of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders third edition,

DSM-III, changed the name of this mental disorder to Antisocial Personality Disorder.12 Analogously to ethnocentrism, ethicocentrism is the tendency to believe that one’s ethical

framework is centrally important, and the correct meter to measure all other moralities.


In the case I just reported, it seems that a “morality” of killing is activated: the

victim is sacrificed because she deserved that punishment in the light of the psy-

chopath’s rigid morality. Being questioned, a morality of decency is advanced and

verbally reported before the moral imperative not to take another person’s life (the

wrong deed consists in throwing the body in the river) and finally, the morality of

not-killing is verbally proposed (the wrong deed consists in the killing itself).

In my perspective of disengagement and reengagement of morality, the first moral

fragment (killing to punish) does not only trigger but also justifies violence, and

plays a dominant role. However, it coexists with other moral fragments, that are

reengaged and that sometimes disengage the dominant one. Many criminal psy-

chopaths share multiple moralities with mentally “sane” human beings, moralities

which play the role of more or less freely chosen “reasons”, and they are involved in

processes of disengagement and reengagement; these various shifts seem anomalous

insofar as they display a strange sudden intermittence of changes or long delays, a

lack of stability within the various stages or an excess of stability, and in some cases

the – so to say – special “individuality” of the adopted structured morality is heavily

at play.

Kiehl contends that many other psychiatric conditions (also some underlying

criminal behaviors) are related to the aforementioned impairments in understanding

moral behavior – still, some, paradoxically, are seen as “unencumbered by moral

imperatives”, as in the case of a schizophrenic who killed someone he thought had

implanted a monitoring device in his head. The usual interpretation of this supposed

lack of morality is the following: in the case above, through our twenty-first-century

academic or forensic ethicocentric screen, the criminal schizophrenic could not be

convinced that sacrificing his victim was a bad thing to do because he was unable

to articulate that it was wrong to kill this person. I rather think that cases like this

are better illustrated as characterized by the stability of a central and unique totally

“subjective” moral framework, not sharable in a collective dimension, but still lived

as “moral” by the human agent (i.e., if the schizophrenic could not be persuaded

into acknowledging that his deeds were wrong, he probably kept thinking they were

right, which is a moral stance). We are dealing with a kind of personal morality, as

I have noted above, envisaged as a fully acceptable dominant morality in a subjec-

tive estimation, concurring with an anomalous absence of those multiple moralities

which in my opinion characterize mentally healthy human beings.13

13 A wealth of research is available on the psychometric aspects of various psychopatho-

logical behaviors, intertwined with glibness, superficial charm, low empathy, lack of guilt

or remorse, and shallow emotions. Other studies concern the neural counterparts of psy-

chopathological symptomatology, which are for example localized in malfunctions of or-

bital frontal cortex, the anterior insula, the anterior cingulate of the frontal lobe and the

amygdala, and adjacent regions of the anterior temporal lobe. Other neural counterparts

are being studied, especially regarding reduced activity in psychopaths during language

processing in the right anterior temporal gyrus, the amygdala, and the anterior and poste-

rior cingulate, in the case of attention, orienting, and affective processes, and the relevant

role in psychopathy of the paralimbic system. Details are furnished in (Kiehl, 2008).

5.2 Pure Evil? 187

Relatively well-known research14 about criminal psychopaths stresses the fact

that they do not discriminate between moral and conventional rules (for example,

mere etiquette and various social rules, such as which side of the road to drive on,

or how to move the pieces in a game of chess), contrarily to non-psychopathic

criminals and “normal” individuals. So to say, the criminal psychopaths rate the

wrongness and seriousness of the respective violations in a similar way and as

authority-independent. Moreover, in a second experimental result criminal

psychopaths tended to treat all rules as “inviolable” in an effort to convince the

experimenter that they were mentally healthy. The interpretation resorts to state a

deficit of moral motivation together with a deficit of moral competence, as a direct

result of the emotional deficit.

I consider this interpretation of results to be puzzling.15 I do not agree with it.

First of all, almost always conventional rules also carry the moral values of a group

(for example, etiquette is not simply a morally-neutral rule), and so the experiment

is biased by this aprioristic assumption of the experimental psychologist; second, the

antisocial violent outcome is not necessarily due to impaired violence inhibition and

to a general lack of emotional concern for others. In the perspective I have outlined

above, the data obtained can also be interpreted in terms of a rigidity in the adoption

of a given moral perspective and in the perseverance in applying the related violent

(criminal) punishment, in lieu of a more open mechanism of moral disengagement

and reengagement in other moralities, possibly less inclined to perform violent pun-

ishment. On the contrary, the supposed lack of moral emotion (Prinz, 2007, p. 45)

seems to me intertwined – at first sight paradoxically – with the production of a

lack of moral flexibility. In this sense criminal psychopaths do not have problems

with morality because they are practically “amoral” and they lack moral (emotional)

commitment, but instead because they are engaged in a kind of rigid hyper-morality,

which is not open to quick and appropriate revisions.16 One should wonder whether

the emotion, in front of inflicted harm, is lacking because subjects are engaged in a

rigid morality whose punishments are seen as just and deserved, or if it is the lack of

emotion that promotes rigidity in the adopted moral perspective. It is not that crimi-

nal psychopaths do not master moral emotions and show reduced activation of areas

involved in attention and emotional processing, but it seems instead they just master

their moral emotions that way: in sum, they are just emotionally retarded in the light

of our moral judgment of “normal” individuals or non-psychopathic criminals!

It is a real pity that psychiatric and psychoanalytic traditions, which are still ob-

sessed by an excess of positivistic commitment, mostly refuse any interest in the

moral aspects of mental illnesses. In this perspective psychiatrists often correctly

complain about the tenacious persistence of a “moralistic” perspective in cases of

childhood sexual victimization, in fact there has been a tendency in psychiatric

14 (Blair et al., 1997).15 (Kelly et al., 2007) illustrate a growing body of evidence which justifies substantial skep-

ticism about all the major conclusions that have been drawn from studies using the

moral/conventional distinction.16 A further interesting point on psychopaths is provided by the psychoanalytical analysis of

the so-called “structure of evil”, as I will illustrate below in subsection 5.3.5.


professionals to vilify17 those very patients who display abnormal sexual behav-

iors as a result of various kinds of sexual trauma (Van Slyke, 2006). I say, to respect

the purported objectivity and freedom from moral bias in scientific evaluation, di-

agnosis, and therapy on the part of the psychiatrist is one thing, but the lack of

consideration towards the moral life of criminal psychopaths and their victims is a

totally different thing. After all, morality is no longer the “other” of scientific ratio-

nality, like it has almost always been considered over the last two centuries (science

deals with what is the case, whereas ethics deals with what ought to be), but a le-

gitimate object of rational analysis.18 Prinz too seems perplexed: “These deviations

suggest that they do not possess moral concepts; or at least that their moral concepts

are fundamentally different from ours” (Prinz, 2007, p. 43).19

Here we may draw an interesting parallel with confabulating. As mentioned in

chapter four,20 confabulation results from the inability to discard beliefs or ideas

that are patently false. This is due to the fact that confabulators seem to lack the

mechanisms enabling them to inhibit information that is irrelevant or out of date.

The main effect is that the process of belief monitoring and revision cannot take

place, and the confabulator is simply trapped within his bubble. I argue that some-

thing similar may happen to criminal psychopaths. That is, they are trapped in a sort

of moral confabulation resulting from the inability to discard a certain morality as

unacceptable. In turn, such an inability would block the normal moral flexibility and

thus the process of moral reengagement.

To sum up, usually perpetrators of evil do not regard themselves, like Kant

had already stressed, as wrongdoers, neither in case of sound people nor of course,

all the more so, in the case of mentally ill ones. Paradoxically, they often see them-

selves as victims, for example treated unjustly or aggressively, so that they think –

perversely – they should deserve sympathy, support, and tolerance (if not praise).

5.2.2 Mental Incapacity and the Fear of Decriminalization

It has to be said that present-day legal judgments of psychopathological criminals

strongly avoid the exploitation of “moral” considerations and also tend to disre-

gard the possible “moral” aspects of criminal conduct. Currently, the attribution of

17 It could be speculatively suggested that such a perspective is the remnant of a vestigial

“honor” culture, which despises, insulates and punishes those guiltless troubled individuals

just as a family would punish a girl who lost her virginity because of rape. The issue of

honor cultures has been addressed in subsection 1.2.2 of chapter one.18 On Searle’s contention that to say something is true is already to say you ought to believe

it, that is other things being equal, you ought not to deny it cf. above at page 22, chapter

one. This means that normativity is more widespread than expected19 On the moral content of what is called “personal construct theory taxonomy” of the acts of

killers cf. (Winter, 2006). Winter quotes the serial killer Alan Brady (2001): “Serial killers,

like it or not, can possess just as many admirable facets of character as anyone else, and

sometimes more than average”.20 Cf. section 4.6.

5.2 Pure Evil? 189

responsibility to criminals often takes advantage of the concept of mental incapac-

ity so that, in these cases, the moral judgment about moral conducts of “psycho-

pathological” criminals is potentially extinguished insofar as they are merely seen

as affected by an overall mental incapacity, exclusive object of the psychiatric and

legal technicalities. One must note that the attribution of responsibility changes over

time, as Lacey (2010, p. 116) observes: “[. . . ] patterns of responsibility-attribution

relate to the roles and needs of a criminal justice system: to a political need for

legitimation, and to a practical need to specify and co-ordinate the sorts of knowl-

edge which can be brought into a court room”. In the late nineteenth century, these

patterns were finally affected by the diffusion of democratic sentiments and enti-

tlements, thus transcending the traditional notions of “acting maliciously” or ex-

hibiting a “bad moral character”. Nowadays, the state’s responsibility in proving

not only conduct but also individual responsibility (i.e., psychological and internal,

capacity-based, requirements of “mens rea”, the guilty mind presupposed by crimi-

nal liability) is crucial for the legitimation of criminal law, not as a system of brutal,

retaliating force but as a system of actual justice.

What is at stake is that “the treatment of what we would today call mental in-

capacity defences, in which what would become the psychiatric profession was

emerging as an authoritative witness to the ‘facts of the mental matter”’ is related

to the fact that “[. . . ] in principle, the field of mental incapacity should reflect the

most fully developed aspect of the ‘inner’ or ‘psychological’ model of criminal

responsibility” (p. 119). In brief, it is evident that, in this perspective, the jury’s

commonsense moral assumptions about madness, which characterized the evalu-

ative/character based practice of the past, decline. Currently, incapacity defenses

which lead to judgments of non-responsibility focus on cognitive incapacities (for

example “lesions of the will”,21 found in the factual conditions of mental, inner or

neural states of individuals, where knowledge and consciousness are central), as op-

posed to volitional incapacities, that were considered as forms of moral insanity.

Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning that Lacey concludes by acknowledging a kind

of resurgence of character-based patterns of attribution of criminal responsibility:

Emerging from their subterranean (though clearly important) position in the exercise of

discretion at prosecution and sentencing stages, character-based principles are enjoy-

ing a revival not only in “three strikes and you’re out” sentencing laws and paedophile

registers but also in the substantive law, particularly that dealing with terrorism, and in

the operation of evidential presumptions, detention rules and the renewed admissibility

of evidence of bad character. Why, we might ask, has character suddenly become an

acceptable explicit principle of criminalisation once again? And does this imply that

its decline was more formal than real? (2010, p. 129).

The reason for this resurgence seems to be clear: further attention for capacity-

based practices of responsibility-attribution better relates to the habit of consider-

ing individuals and their engaged capacities per se rather than their social status

or appearance, that is to say, an attitude towards the whole practice of justice which

21 Cf. below, subsection 5.2.4.


derives from certain standards of legitimation following the democratic acknowl-

edgement of individual freedoms. Unfortunately, such a disposition would prosper

in a world endowed with

[. . . ] some confidence in its institutional capacity to deliver such individualised judg-

ments while maintaining adequate levels of social control. Such a world has arguably

never existed. But that individualising impulse has most certainly had a significant

impact on the form of (some parts of) criminal law over the course of its “moderni-

sation”. We might speculate that, at times when the sentiments underpinning norms

towards equal liberties are fragile, perhaps because of fears about crime, or terrorism,

or order more generally, explicitly character-based patterns of attribution tend to enjoy

a revival (ibid.)

In sum, the revival of “moral character” in criminal law seems related to the re-

newed emergence of a culture of control in our anxious, fragile, and insecure world,

which results in a potential greater criminalization, recognizable “overcriminaliza-

tion”, as I will illustrate in the following chapter.22

From a wider point of view, one could notice how both the hypertrophic diffu-

sion of psycho-pathological insights in the appraisal of criminal responsibility and

the revival of character-based criminalization are easy ways of escaping a more

burdensome, yet richer, practice of criminal justice: as I just stated, stressing the

criminals’ moral character leads to the inescapable excess of overcriminalization,

but similarly, a reductionist psychopathology of criminals yields the perverted fruit

of utter decriminalization (at least from the point of view of social ideologies and

everyday people’s mentality), resulting in the impossibility of any guilt ever being

attested.

So far, I have contended that many of the pernicious outcomes of the anomalous

engagement and disengagement of moralities are caused by the “anomalous” en-

gagement of more or less rigid personal, individual moralities – that only the agent

himself recognizes as such – and by their abnormal consecutive replacement. The

reader could ask, how can a morality that is private still be a morality? She should

note that morality can be fragmented and private – in the sense that it is not shared

with some specific group – because it is a vestigial remaining of more ancient moral

concerns and axiological frameworks, as I have illustrated when dealing with the

psychoanalytic concept of collective unconscious:23 for example, mobbing and bul-

lying behaviors are surely not explicitly labeled as “moral” in our civil Western

countries, but still mentally “work” in people and are perceived as good motivations

for supposed-to-be “moral” behaviors, exactly as they worked fairly well in ancient

times, for example when the scapegoat mechanism was a perfectly approved, effi-

cient, and justified conduct. Of course these behaviors were not necessarily labeled

“moral” in the respective human groups, with the same meaning we now sophisti-

catedly and intellectually attribute to it, but certainly they de facto played a decisive

role in that cooperative sense which works in the case of coalition enforcement.24

22 Cf. section 6.5.23 Cf. chapter four, subsection 4.8.5.24 Cf. this book, chapter one.

5.2 Pure Evil? 191

5.2.3 Gene/Cognitive Niche Co-Evolution and Moral

Decriminalization

The process of moral decriminalization of so-called criminal psychos I have just in-

dicated certainly presents some puzzling problems. To shed more light on the prob-

lem of decriminalization let us illustrate the example of violent physical attacks:

thanks to evolutionary biology we know that conspecific aggression is usually re-

lated to the establishment of sexual and social dominance and mostly exhibited by

males. Physical aggression may have provided societal fitness in the stone age (to

gain a good hierarchical position and sexual dominance), but physical aggression is

morally and legally inhibited in many modern societies, which value cultural domi-

nance over physical force, taking advantage of that process of civilization so clearly

illustrated by Elias (1969). (Of course civilization is a recent cultural acquisition in

cognitive niches of Western societies, and there are still countries where physical

violence and aggression are largely admitted as a means of self-establishment).

Physical aggression is nevertheless still widespread in the “civilized world”.

Why? I have already noted that the speculative Jungian hypothesis about the ex-

istence of a collective unconscious (and thus of hidden archaic moral templates

of behavior concerning right and wrong, for example based on morality of honor

and of revenge, scapegoating, magic thinking, various religious beliefs, etc.) can

be interpreted as the presence of pervasive and permanent cultural niches, whose

information enters the brain automatically in early life. There are very few cases

of wise babies, to use a term proposed by Ferenczi:25 very young children that are

able to protect themselves from the “barbaric” – archaic – and usually violent fluxes

of cognition and affectivity which often impact newborn cognitive niches (families,

for example). Consequently, once silently stabilized in neural networks, various ar-

chaic moral and non moral aspects of the collective unconscious can be reactivated

and made explicit and effective, together with their violent outcomes. It is also in

this perspective that the reader can better grasp the sense of that “multiplicity of

individual moralities” I have inserted in the title of this chapter. One can hardly be

both a primitive bloody avenger and a civil citizen of a constitutional democracy in

the translucency of his consciousness, indeed the two aspects are in this case in ex-

plicit competition, but he can more easily be both if we take into account the hidden

presence of the collective unconscious.

In our highly composed cognitive niches, a lot of physical violence tends to be

made intelligible as a manifestation of mental retardation, susceptible genes, stress,

low intelligence, brain damage, or in terms of other physical conditions that reduce

the effectiveness of the frontal lobes concerned with conscious control of behav-

ior. The management of these supposed-to-be pathological violent actions is often

25 “The Dream of the Wise Baby” is a one-page text that Ferenczi wrote in 1923. It is a

description of an usual adult dream. It describes a very young child, a neonate, a baby

with glasses, who is teaching adults. It relates to the idea of young children, who had often

been traumatized, and that had accelerated those developmental features that led them to

acquire highly acute sensitivities and intuitions, or wisdom beyond their years.


reserved to the technicalities of forensic psychiatry, which in turn is sometimes

affected by uninformed attitudes, confusions, and excess of business-oriented med-

icalization. In our terms, we can say that psychiatry maintains that in those indi-

viduals that are more susceptible to be permeable to various modes of archaic or

subcultural moral behaviors (related to strong methods of punishment), a particular

permissive state for physical violence can emerge. After all, the child of Western

societies is often immersed in very (morally) violent cognitive niches: thanks to

sensorial exposition to the moral/violent information absorbed through parents and

caregivers (as a matter of routine practice), and later on, through peers and present-

day technological media favored by globalized communication, which give high

potential to cognitive niches made of written language and iconic features. Thus,

various moral templates of behavior are absorbed (together with other “less moral”

templates, related to other kinds of knowledge, belief, art, music, etc.) and imple-

mented in individual brains, immediately available to consciousness or not, “stored

in the neurons in binary fashion as bits of information, and made available at occa-

sion” (Leigh, 2010, p. 122).

I have already highlighted how the “technicalization” of violent behavior leads to

some degrees of decriminalization both in trials (excuse, mitigation, etc.)26 through

insanity defenses, and in people’s mentality, and how this is crucial for the legitima-

tion of criminal law, not as a system of brutal, retaliating force but as a system of

justice. A lot of – more or less scientific – knowledge is available, for instance from

psychiatry and neuroscience, and it came to be considered as an authoritative source

for describing who is to be held responsible and who is not in the case of violent ag-

gressive behavior. Unfortunately, even if in various cases the lack of responsibility

is patent, in various other cases it is not. The gene/cognitive niche co-evolution can

help us to understand why.

Let us better introduce the problem of gene/cognitive niche evolution, by first of

all coming back to a point I made in connection with the “multiplicity of individual

moralities”. As argued above, different moralities may co-exist in a single person

even though they are not all active at the same moment. A continuous process of

disengagement and reengagement fairly describes the kind of plasticity characteriz-

ing our moral life. It is a complex theoretical task to treat the issue of moral plas-

ticity from an evolutionary perspective. I already made quite a bold claim about it

referring to the highly speculative yet intriguing idea of the collective unconscious:

now I will try to further refine my proposal with respect to the gene/cognitive niche

co-evolution.

My proposal is that the various archaic (both moral and non moral) aspects of the

collective unconscious are more likely to emerge in connection with the impover-

ishment of the cognitive niches one lives in: that is, some moral templates relying

on archaic modes of moral behavior are somehow re-activated or re-enacted as the

result of a “moral sensory deprivation” caused by the pauperization of a cognitive

niche.

26 On the problems of psychiatric aspects of justification, excuse and mitigation in Anglo-

American criminal law cf. (Buchanan, 2000).

5.2 Pure Evil? 193

As already maintained,27 cognitive niches are also moral niches insofar as they

implicitly specify the most suitable behaviors to activate in order to exploit the

various cognitive chances provided by the environment. The specification of such

behaviors is governed by moral affordances functioning like anchors that, in turn,

facilitate or even suggest the activation of the most profitable behavioral “scripts” in

a given cognitive niche. For example, consider the case of science: science is artic-

ulated in a cognitive niche that is constructed so as to deliver and ponder evidence

and counter evidence around a certain hypothesis or idea. In order to fully exploit

the potential of such a cognitive niche, scientists should comply – at least – with a

number of rules/norms that are essentially moral (in many cases, also endowed with

legal counterparts). For instance, they are not supposed to lie about the results of

their experiment by hacking them so as to support their hypothesis. That would be

considered as cheating.

More generally, I claim that the presence of a cognitive niche implicitly requires

compliance – partly described by docility28 – with certain moral behaviors that, if

successfully activated, allow a person or a group to fully exploit the chances fur-

nished by the local cognitive niche. Now, what happens when a morally valued

cognitive niche goes through a process of impoverishment? The impoverishment

of a cognitive niche can be described as the permanent loss of certain cognitive

chances due to a pauperizing structural re-organization of the environment affecting

the way external resources are accessed and moral sensory stimulation is nested. For

instance, one of the first appreciable consequences is the increase of the social and

moral costs associated with sustaining a certain standard of performance. As such

costs go up, a person or, more likely, a group, is pressed into adopting supereroga-

tory acts. Or, as a more economical alternative, the same person (or group of per-

sons) may be prompted to deactivate a set of moral templates in use and re-activate

some other templates typical of different contexts. The success of these strategies,

aimed at the restructuring of the niche, is extremely contextual and cannot be guar-

anteed: consequently, if one fails in applying one of these two options the result

may become extremely awkward from a moral point of view. A perverted morality

of paroxysmal mutual help might drain the individual’s psycho-cognitive energy out

of excessive supererogations, while the reactivation of a hazardous or anachronistic

set of templates might only quicken the crumbling of a niche by pulling the plug

on the moral conventions underpinning the life of its members so far: the niche’s

morality then turns out to be “maladaptive” (at least, in a local – not Darwinian –

sense).

Consider for instance the case of democracy. Democracy can be considered as a

carrier of powerful cognitive moral niches permitting the flourishing and maintenance

of fundamental pillars for our living, for instance, capitalism, science, modern civi-

lization, Rechtsstaat. Its recent impoverishment in rich Western countries – that can

be partly described as ochlocratization29 – has favored the emergence of what I will

describe further in this chapter as the “Fascist state of the mind”. From the perspective

27 See chapter four, subsection 4.1.3.28 See chapter one, subsection 1.3.2.29 See above, chapter three, sections 3.5 and 3.6.


of a sincere supporter of democracy, the Fascist state of the mind is a set of violent

and archaic templates of moral behavior that drastically dumb down the moral char-

acter of those who adopt it, facilitating various episodes of strong violent punishment,

such as aggressive propaganda, demonization of the opposition, mobbing, bullying,

intellectual genocide,30 political assassination, and so on. The recent financial crisis

and its connection with globalization is a case in point that can support my claim. It is

well-known that, during the last decade, the democratic niche – which also profitably

assisted capitalism – has been weakened by the emergence of deregulation and other

phenomena, chiefly the removal of government rules and regulations constraining the

free market. Such a policy did not produce any benefit either for the market or the pop-

ulation. Quite the contrary, it literally deconstructed part of the democratic niche. It

has inexorably pauperized society as a whole, favoring the re-activation of forces that

are hostile to capitalism and democracy itself, and their related old-fashioned moral

templates of behavior and axiologies.31

In order to clarify this point from an evolutionary perspective, thus dealing briefly

with the hotly debated issue related to the relationship between culture and nature, I

summarize here again the main points related to gene/cognitive niche co-evolution.

In chapter four32 I have introduced the co-evolution between genes and cognitive

niches. I have described that general inheritance (natural selection among organ-

isms influences which individuals will survive to pass their genes onto the next

generation) is accompanied by another inheritance system which plays a fundamen-

tal role in biological evolution, where niche construction counts. It is the general

inheritance system (also called ecological inheritance by Odling-Smee, Laland and

Feldman (2003)). In the life of organisms, the first system occurs as a one-time,

unique endowment through the process of reproduction (sexual for example); on

the contrary, the second system can in principle be performed by any organism to-

wards any other organism (“ecological” but not necessarily “genetic” neighbors),

at any moment of their lifetime. Organisms adapt to their environments but also

adapt to environments as modified by themselves or other organisms. From this per-

spective, acquired characteristics can play a role in the evolutionary process, even

if in a non-Lamarckian way, through their influence on selective environments via

cognitive niche construction. Phenotypes construct niches, which then become new

sources of natural selection, possibly responsible for modifying their own genes

through ecological inheritance feedback (in this sense phenotypes are not merely

the “vehicles” of their genes).

In sum, from the point of view of niche-construction, evolution depends on two

selective processes, a blind process based on the natural selection of diverse or-

ganisms in populations exposed to environmental selection pressures and a second

process based on the semantically informed selection of diverse actions, relative

to diverse environmental factors, at diverse times and places, by individual niche-

constructing organisms. The second process was not described by Darwin. In this

30 Cf. below subsection 5.3.3.31 As regards the finance-dominated accumulation regime, income distribution, and the current

crisis, cf. the very clear account in (Stockhammer, 2009).32 Subsection 4.1.2.

5.2 Pure Evil? 195

process selection selects for purposive organisms, that is, niche-constructing organ-

isms. Consequently, the process of transmission and selection of the extragenetic in-

formation that is embedded in cognitive niche transformations has to be considered

loosely Darwinian for three main reasons (Odling-Smee et al., 2003, pp. 256-257.):

1. extragenetically informed behavior patterns are broadly adaptive and

maladaptive;

2. variants occurring during genetic evolution are random, whereas those of ex-

tragenetic information are not. They are smart variants, because the response

to both internal and environmental cues is targeted appropriately to behavioral

repertoires. As I have said above, variation is in this case blind but also con-

structed because “[. . . ] which variants are inherited and what final form they

assume depends on various ‘filtering’ and ‘editing’ processes that occur before

and during the transmission” (Jablonka and Lamb, 2005, p. 319). In this sense

extragenetic information produces variants, which originate suitable cognitive

stabilities in artifactual niches, which in turn “afford” humans and other organ-

isms in many ways.

3. extragenetic information

a. when neurally stored – both consciously and unconsciously – it allows a

strong interaction of its elements, which can also be seen in selective terms,

as suggested by neural Darwinism theory, which sees neurons as diverse

populations submitted to loosely Darwinian effects at the level of both neu-

ral development and moment-to-moment functioning which interfaces with

experience;33

b. when stored in material devices it no longer presents the characters of a

more or less Darwinian evolving creative population, like in the case of

neural cells: instead it has an evolutionary impact insofar as it causes per-

sistent modifications upon the environment.

Edelman’s theory – which is also supported by the evidence provided by some

artificial intelligence devices called “Darwin automata”, expressly built to test it –

is controversial, as Rose clearly explains, because of the way the theory consid-

ers how extragenetic information is transformed through the dynamics of synaptic

modifications:

During development there is thus a superabundance of synaptic productions, a ver-

itable efflorescence – but if synapses cannot make their appropriate functional con-

nections with the dendrites of the neurons they approach, they become pruned away

and disappear. This overproduction of neurons and synapses might seem wasteful. It

has led to the argument that just during evolution “natural selection” still eliminates

less-fit organisms, so some similar process of selection occurs within the developing

brain – a process that the immunologist and theorist of human consciousness Gerald

Edelman has called “neural Darwinism”. However, this transference of the “survival

of the fittest” metaphor from organisms to cells is only partially correct. It seems prob-

able that the whole process of cellular migration over large distances, the creation of

33 Cf. (Edelman, 1989, 1993; Seth and Baars, 2005).


long-range order, requires the working out of some internal programmes of both in-

dividual cells and the collectivity of cells acting in concert. [. . . ] Overproduction and

subsequent pruning of neurons and synapses may at one level of magnification look

like competition and selection; viewed on the larger scale, they appear as co-operative

processes (1993, p. 76).

Anyway, according to Edelman the brain would be a Darwinian “selection sys-

tem that operates within an individual lifetime” (Edelman, 2006, p. 27) so as some

synapses are strengthened and some are weakened through the experiential selec-

tion. What biases the brain system to yield adaptive responses is a process called

reentry “[. . . ] a continual signaling from one brain region (or map) to another and

back again across massively parallel fibers (axons) that are known to be omnipresent

in higher brains. Reentrant signal paths constantly change with the speed of thought.

[. . . ] consciousness is entailed by reentrant activity among cortical areas and the tha-

lamus and by the cortex interacting with itself and with subcortical structures” (pp.

28 and 36). It is from this perspective that – through core reentrant neural integra-

tive processes – many sensory and motor signals are linked together, thus providing

various perceptual categorizations (also connected to memory) which originate a

scene “in the remembered present of primary consciousness, a scene with which an

animal could lay plans”, and of course motor outputs (p. 36). Selectionist brains are

certainly the effect of historical contingency, irreversibility, and the operation of non

linear processes.

In the light of the previous considerations, given the fact there is

1. a co-evolution between genes and cognitive niches34 during human evolution

and, especially,

2. because of their specific coupling which occurs during the life of any individual,

the methods that are currently used in Western societies to discharge moral and legal

responsibility seem to me unclear in their epistemic structure and so partially unre-

liable. Indeed, it is a fact that the brain is configured in a certain way, and there is

evidence according to which the presence of genetic or anatomic disfunction (such

as epilepsy, delirium, dementia, thyroid dysfunction, cerebrovascular disease, en-

cephalitis, diabetes, etc.) promotes aggressiveness: the problem is that all this is often

vaguely linked to a consequent lack or impairment of free will capacities, and nothing

more. Indeed, philosophers of free will frequently refer to mental and brain disorders

as conditions that compromise free will and reduce moral responsibility, and so does

forensic psychiatry.35 For example, what if some neural clusters were shaped during

the personal history of an individual immersed in the aggressive morality of an honor

34 Cognitive niches are made of fashion, makeup, culinary arts, painting, architecture, music,

poetry, fiction, nonfiction, ideologies, morality, science, technologies, medicine, psychol-

ogy and so on. Neurons in brains are constantly in interaction with other neurons but also

with the exogenous information embedded in cognitive niches, acquired through senses

(Leigh, 2010).35 I have extensively dealt with the problem of free will and of the ownership of our own

destinies in the current technological world in (Magnani, 2007b, chapter three).

5.2 Pure Evil? 197

culture, so that he presents anomalous distribution of excitations in areas related to ag-

gressiveness (even detectable through fMRI scans) with respect to “normal” agents?

Does this authorize us to state that the person who embodies those neural networks is

not responsible for his violent, illegal outbursts? Is the presence of certain genes, sus-

ceptible to the exposure to unlucky cognitive niches (for instance an abusive family),

a reason which authorizes the philosopher or the forensic psychiatrist to subsequently

hypothesize a lack or an impairment of free will in a criminal offender? Furthermore,

on another level, does the fact that his brain did not have the chance to be exposed

to the cognitive niche of civil morality, as embedded in law itself, make the criminal

offender morally and/or legally condoned?

5.2.4 Can We Freely Decide to Kill Our Free Will? What Is Crime

Commodification?

I agree with Meynen (2010) who contends that both in philosophy and forensic psy-

chiatry “it remains unclear in what way free will is compromised by mental disor-

ders”. A connection between mental disorder and freedom is present – and proposed

as scientifically granted – in the introduction of the fourth edition of the Diagnos-

tic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV).36 It reads, “In DSM-IV,

each of the mental disorders is conceptualized as a clinically significant behavioral

or psychological syndrome or pattern that occurs in an individual and that is as-

sociated with present distress (e.g., a painful symptom) [. . . ] or an important loss

of freedom”.37 It is important to note that various notions of free will can be ad-

vanced – and are not devoid in themselves of ambiguities: 1) one must be able to

act otherwise; one must have alternative possibilities; 2) one must be able to act or

choose for a reason; 3) one has to be the originator (the causal source) of the action.

Obviously free will is always related to moral responsibility. Various constraints,

both standard and psychiatric, are supposed to create problems for free will, for ex-

ample, diminished capacity, intoxication, unconscious drives, infancy, entrapment,

duress or coercion, kleptomaniac impulses, obsessional neuroses, desires that are

experienced as alien, post-hypnotic commands, threats, instances of force majeure,

various psychopathological states, physical and genetic impairments. Such excuses

typically find application in cases involving the ignorant, the misled, the coerced,

the mentally insane, the intoxicated, the biologically abnormal. In these cases the

actus reus tends to be conceded but mens rea is denied.

In the presence of these constraints, moral condemnation and/or legal punish-

ment appear to be inappropriate. Meynen concludes that philosophers of free will

have paid scarce attention “to identifying the precise reasons why (certain) men-

tal disorders would diminish free will; a detailed analysis of what it is that mental

disorders do that has such an effect on free will is lacking”: this happens in the

36 In Europe and other parts of the world, the ICD-10 Classification of Mental and Behavioral

Disorders has been the predominant diagnostic system (World Health Organisation, 1992).37 (American Psychiatric Association, 1994, p. xxi, quoted in (Meynen, 2010)).


case of defining criminal responsibility in real subjects (for example related to psy-

chosis), which leads to the choice of non-moral medical treatment instead of the

fully moral/legal punishment which would normally follow a misbehavior. For ex-

ample it is not clear when free will is partially compromised, and then when and

to what extent responsibility can be actually discarded. The empirical fact that legal

or psychiatric forensic technicalities can de facto solve ambiguities does not mean

they are always based on serious scientific reasons.38

The man who killed his girlfriend that I mentioned above in subsection 5.2.1 acted

for reasons as strong as moral imperatives, so in this respect his free will is preserved:

his mental disorder does not affect the related meaning of free will. Similarly, can

the capacity to choose alternative possibilities be jeopardized by mental disorder?

There is no final answer to this question, yet. Finally, what about the source/cause

of criminal violent action, which depicts the third sense of free will I have indicated

above? Is it the guilt, the “proper person”, his mental disorder, or his “biology”?

Professional psychologists and the so-called behavioral scientists argue for a

broader range of ways in which psychology might be applied to criminal justice

and, thereby, to law (Carson et al., 2007). They always contend that further “sci-

entific” light can be shed not only on the problem of criminal responsibility, but

also on eyewitness identification, investigative interviewing, credibility assessments

and lie detection, fact finding, evidence, decision making and its discontents. They

stress, for instance, that legal judgements, in particular, are influenced by short-cut,

heuristical reasoning processes which have to be studied and clarified. I would like

to note that psychology and other behavioral sciences do not have a privileged dis-

ciplinary status, for instance over philosophy or logic, that criminal justice “must”

take advantage of. It is well known that too many psychologists just aim at pro-

moting and diffusing their discipline as necessary everywhere, all the more in legal

settings, even if the contribution often result scarce or counterproductive. Just to

make an example, it is very sad that the study of abduction, so important in criminal

38 A related problem concerns the fact that psychiatry confronts not only the sic Other but

also the intercultural sic Other: how can psychiatry take these multiple otherness(es) into

account without sacrificing its own rationalistic universal points of view? My friend Gio-

vanni Corsico, a militant psychiatrist, usefully observes that psychiatry, to attenuate the

eventually violent effect of theoretical universalization, has to give some precedence to

systematic “observation”, an observation that should occur when taking advantage of an

“empathetic distance” with respect to the sic Other. Indeed, it has to be acknowledged that

therapeutic treatment tends towards normalization and to the extinction of every manifes-

tation of that same otherness and of its eco-cognitive existential uniqueness. In turn, my

friend continues by warning us that the psychiatric judgement of insanity, which comes

from the psychiatric (eventually forensic) technicalities – related to the embarrassingly

powerful monumental/universal nosography – “should not disregard that sense of ‘inbe-

ing’ (the existence – inherence – in something else)”, which concerns the psychiatrist him-

self, together with a firm awareness of the “sense of shared culpability”. Something similar

is acknowledged by the attention given to the role of “listening and answering” proposed

by the phenomenological approach to otherness, elaborated for example by Waldenfels

(2007b; 2007a). On this “responsive phenomenology” cf. also the annotation given above

at page 68.

5.2 Pure Evil? 199

investigation and in legal trials, is paradoxically disregarded by the psychologists

themselves, even if studied in depth for example by philosophers, logicians, and AI

scientists (Magnani, 2009). Some psychologists even acknowledge that “[. . . ] unfor-

tunately whilst work on abduction and defeasible arguments is exciting the interest

of computational scientists interested in artificial intelligence it has provoked less

interest amongst psychologists” (Carson, 2007).

Let us present a further interesting speculation. What about a person that, in pres-

ence of dysfunctional cognitive niches (poverty, abuse, and other various kinds of

direct or structural violence), has in the beginning freely chosen and later on freely

educated himself (and his brain’s neural networks) to perform violent physical ag-

gressiveness, fearlessly and repeatedly. Indeed, after years, he might have developed

a criminal psychopathic personality and he can be described as such by a psychia-

trist. In such cases the everyday language clearly expresses the same conclusion of

the psychiatrist: “he is dominated by his impulses”, so it is not him that performed

the crime but his mental illness: get medical treatment!

A question arises: who (or what) transformed him into a person who lacks free

will or has it impaired? He himself, his environment, his brain, his genes? I think

we need more knowledge about puzzling situations like this.39 Could it help our

analysis to consider a person – for instance responsible for violent actions – who is

supposed to be affected by a psychopathological lack (or impairment) of free will,

yet who may also have freely brought himself to that condition? Maybe he freely

chose a specific reaction in his coupling with cognitive niches, a reaction that later

on conducted “him” to weaken or annihilate his own free will.

From this perspective we can see that people can be considered as responsible for

dismissing the ownership of their own destiny. But, what about the responsibility

for violent actions committed after that initial moral “choice”, in the presence of the

consequent impaired intentionality and free will? A similar problem is illustrated by

Meynen himself (2010). I gladly submit his words to the reader:

For instance, with respect to the person being the “genuine source of the action”, I

mentioned that the mental disorder-rather than the “person proper” – could be con-

sidered the cause of a crime. Yet, this raises the question, what is the person proper

and how can one distinguish the person proper from a mental disorder? This line of

39 I have to say that my philosophical discussion is not aimed at violently attacking the prac-

tice of providing legal excuses for those whose criminal acts were due to severe mental ill-

ness. I am aware that an often rudimentary attack on legal excuse and mitigation is already

acting in society and legal settings, even in the case of serious psychotic disorders: I do not

endorse such an attack at all. On this problem, in the US, cf. (Felthous, 2010). On the vio-

lent structural aspects of forensic psychiatric settings, the creation of a risk society by so-

called corporate psychiatry, in which risks are controlled through chemical straight jackets

and individual human rights disappear into the vacuum of individual immorality and cor-

porate greed, and the so called “medicalization of evil” cf. (Mason, 2006). On the recent

use of neurological evidence in trials and the cases of neuroimaging of aggression (that is

the involvement of certain brain regions in the etiology of aggression and violence useful

for the court system), data on competency, disposition, insanity, dangerousness, substance-

abuse, neurotoxicology, also in minority groups cf. (MacNeill Horton and Hartlage, 2003).


questioning will, sooner or later, bring up the question, what exactly is a mental disor-

der? – a central topic in the philosophy of psychiatry. And if we focus on the “cause”

of an event, then we must decide how to assess, among the manifold phenomena that

contribute to the occurrence of a particular event (e.g., actions), which of these contrib-

utory phenomena count as an authentic “cause”. For instance, did an addict’s original

decision to use heroin cause the heroin addiction and thus also cause the actions that

subsequently resulted from the heroin addiction? In brief, a central issue will be, how

do the person proper and the disorder relate and how can they be distinguished when

it comes to the initiation of actions?

Is this attitude still reminiscent of the old-fashioned judgment based on moral

character, that (it seems) we had abandoned in the nineteenth century, or is it an

actual problem we need to address when evaluating crimes? In which cases should

we condone a criminal and the violence he perpetrated? In case that we condone

his crime, but the criminal had performed the violent action in a state of free will,

are we not in the presence of a kind of perverse disguised forgiveness, a dressed up

excuse, which does further wrong to all the other criminals who could not benefit

from the same awkward forgiveness?40

Sometimes people adopt a sincere morality of love and compassion, which in our

cultural niches always “pretends” to be harmless and familiar and instead turns out

to be simply tragic. Indeed, some people, at the same time, implicitly adopt a culture

of violence, like Zizek (2003, p. 30) clearly stresses, referring to the prototypical

example of Che Guevara’s diary.

Let me say, with the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided

by strong feelings of love. It is impossible to think of an authentic revolutionary with-

out this quality. This is perhaps one of the greatest dramas of a leader; he must combine

an impassioned spirit with a cold mind and make painful decisions without flinching

one muscle. Our vanguard revolutionaries [. . . ] cannot descend, with small doses of

daily affection, to the places where ordinary men put their love into practice.41

We face two possible explanations of violent love: direct and indirect killing.

1. It is the fact of having chosen – responsibly – a violent morality of love that

directly generated your violent criminal actions (“I killed my girlfriend because

I loved her”, is a typical thought/explanation of too many sound human males).

2. It is that “originally” free choice of “absolute” love that later on generated in

your neural brain an anomalous constitutive (and hardly reversible) inclination

to give up any inhibition to aggressiveness. So, even after having killed your

girlfriend, you say “I killed my girlfriend because I loved her”: you are the

one who says you loved her, but you are still the same one who killed her, and

now you are glad that something other can be blamed for it, for instance your

anomalous brain circuits full of “irresistible impulses” and “automatisms”. And

these were gradually implemented by none other than yourself, thanks to your

“past” free coupling with cognitive niches. Against all odds, you are the one

40 On the apories and possible violent aspects of forgiveness cf. chapter six, section 6.6.41 Quoted from (Anderson, 1997, pp. 636–637).

5.2 Pure Evil? 201

who, no matter how indirectly, killed his own girlfriend, thanks to a perverse

and not-so-involuntarily dismissal of your free will.42

The case of the human male killing his female illustrates the typical story of vio-

lent outcomes of “fatal love” (Buchli, 2006): the killer consciously and responsibly

chooses to be possibly (yet automatically) violent, and, embedded in that moral

bubble,43 he always – also after the crime – thinks of himself as a loving per-

son, notwithstanding all the violence he perpetrated. Not only, when he provides

an explanation of his “irresistible impulses”, which of course he could not control

(because they are out of the reach of his free will), he still consciously affirms he

killed his female because he loved her, as he has not given up yet on applying the

love-morality (but, in the background, the killer was another agent, his “anomalous

brain’). “Ok guys, I killed her, but it is not me who killed her, it was my brain. . . ”

Even if we do not have to fear the psychiatric legal decriminalization, which is in

any case justified by the need for a “civilization” of the criminal law – beyond a brutal

and monochrome force of blind punishment – it is worth stressing that psychiatric,

psychological, and neurological knowledge is often rudimentary, obviously continu-

ally changing during the standard research processes of the involved academics, and

often applied in settings where incompetence, excessive economic drives, greed and

other variables endowed with possible violent outcomes are at play. What is really

unfortunate, in my opinion, is that media and consequently public opinion became

absolutely comfortable with insanity pleas, in spite of being conspicuously ignorant

as far as the knowledge of forensic psychiatry is concerned. Still, the bits of informa-

tion people acquired taught them the capacity to roughly classify almost any violent

or bloody actions as the fruit of criminal psychopathologic individuals. In such a way

– curiously – they are inclined to decriminalize them, nearly a priori.

In sum, for common people the violent individual is no longer responsible be-

cause he was – so to say – the real victim of a kind of mental infection due to a

“parasitic” moral niche (i.e. poverty, a revengeful honor culture. . . ), or because the

real killer was “his biology” (an anomalous brain, for example). On one side the

responsible party is the objective moral niche, on the other an unlucky biology.44

42 On the perverse culture of irresistible impulse cf. above at page 174.43 I have described the concept of moral bubble in chapter three (subsection 3.2.2).44 Interestingly, Miller (2010, p. 731) addresses this problem of responsibility complaining

about the “mistreatment of psychology in the decades of brain”. The observed outside

interest-group pressure on National Institutes of Health (NIH) in US would be “unques-

tionably well intentioned but misguided, and it is often motivated in part by the assumption

that biological construals of mental illness reduce stigma. Such a prediction would make

sense if people tend to be held less responsible for their biology than for their psychol-

ogy. Why that should be the case is not apparent. Although such a notion of differential

responsibility is commonplace, it is not obvious that we have less control over our biol-

ogy than over our psychology. The genes one has are not one’s responsibility, but we have

considerable control over their interaction with the environment, and as argued above, that

interaction is where the action is in psychopathology”. The possibility of dangerously “in-

flating” the psychiatric concept of disease through neuro-genetic approaches is treated in

(Schleim, 2009).


Responsibility for violent behavior is externalized and everyone is happy to think

atrocious violence does not normally come from the core of an individual’s free

will. This is a way to sterilize violence and disregard it as something exogenous

to our decisions. Indeed, as I have often contended in this book, it is obviously

extremely painful to look violence in its own vivid eyes. Disregarding violence and,

consequently, the punishment of violent behaviors is easier and also economically of

benefit to present-day states.45 Nowadays, every culture (and subculture) represents

and defines how a person behaves or feels according to a suitable classification

of anomalous mental conditions, and provides the related therapies. Our culture

has allowed for various psychiatric effects of decriminalization, comprising some

supposed-to-be civil legal excuses and more or less efficacious medical treatments,

but also generates an ideological celebration of fatal irresponsibility, which affects

common people’s mentality and invests media.46

Lastly, I think I can draw a small final reflection: in our Western countries, moral

decriminalization, overmoralization (cf. the following chapter, section 6.5) and an

overt commodification of any domain of public life can indeed be said to thrive

off each other. States have always used pecuniary sanctions as efficacious means of

punishment, insofar as they both hurt the wrongdoer and benefit the nation’s coffers,

but this would not happen at the expense of a proportioned (often even excessive)

moral-legal punishment. Nowadays, we witness a progressive moral decriminaliza-

tion in most violent cases presumably related to criminal psychopathy and/or lack

of conscious deliberation (mostly resorting to arguments about the psychopatholog-

ical dimension of crime, as explained in the previous sections) being paired with

an increasing commodified overmoralization. By this, I mean to stress how only the

prosecution of misbehaviors that can be economically punished is increasingly pur-

sued, while an embarrassing “dogoodist” moral decriminalization is applied to other

felonies: for instance, those concerning offense and harm against individuals, ide-

als, and fundamental democratic institutions, from whose prosecution no particular

economic public gain can be drawn. As a matter of fact, it seems much harder for a

45 This last consideration also explains why we frequently face the sad feeling – also sup-

ported by some empirical evidence – that, too often, certain criminal patients cannot be

included inside “corporate psychiatry”. Also because of the degradation of welfare states

almost everywhere in rich countries, such criminals are neither medically treated nor pun-

ished, and often left alone to harm again and again, faced with the indifference of forensic

psychiatrists, of public opinion (until they become the victims of the moment and then

play the role of scandalized citizens), and of all those who are more or less responsible

for their condition. A kind of disruption of both the modern rational ambition towards

the cognitive recovery of psychopathological criminals, and of the Rechtsstaat’s duty to

administrate punishment: this in turn becomes extremely violent and unjust against those

who are not lucky enough as to fall within some psychiatric excuse, and whose moral

punishment becomes consequently harsher, turning them into awkward scapegoats.46 A study on lay recognition of psychopathy and beliefs about those behavioral manifesta-

tions, etiology, and treatments of psychopathy is illustrated in (Furnham et al., 2009). An

expected strong confusion in distinguishing between cases of psychopathy, depression,

and schizophrenia is shown: the authors conclude that educational programs are required

to improve mental health literacy in relation to psychopathy among the general public.

5.3 Fascist Morality and Happy Violence: “The Fascist State of the Mind” 203

fraudulent banker to plead mentally ill – and get away with it – than it is for a serial

murderer. . . !

5.3 Fascist Morality and Happy Violence: “The Fascist State of

the Mind”

Chapter nine of Bollas’ book Being a Character (1993), entitled “The Fascist State

of Mind” begins with a famous sentence attributed to Benito Mussolini (1935): “Our

program is simple, they ask us for programs. But there are already too many. It is

not programs that are wanting for the salvation of Italy but men and willpower”: it

is clear that the complexity of words and ideas of “programs” are merely considered

stupidities, worthy of weak people. Bollas immediately says that “[. . . ] fascism ex-

tolled the virtue of the state, an organic creation driven by the militant will of the

masses [. . . ]. ‘Fascist’ is now a metaphor in our world for a particular kind of per-

son, and I wish to reserve this ironic scapegoating of the Fascist from the convenient

movement of its personification of evil, as, like Wilhem Reich and Hannah Arendt,

I shall argue that there is a Fascist in each of us and that there is indeed a highly

identifiable psychic profile for this personal state” (pp. 193 and 196).

The Fascist state of the mind is seen by Bollas as “ordinary”: how does one be-

come fascist? Following Hanna Arendt, Bollas contends that, looking at the camps

of Buchenwald and Dachau, terror becomes total “when it becomes independent of

all opposition” (Arendt, 1976), some kind of gangs dominated by “a hierarchy of

Hitler clones” watched each other commit atrocities in order to ensure that no one

in the gang stepped outside the ethos of terror. Something similar is occurring at

the level of the individual unconscious psyche where a kind of highly structured

destructive narcissism, which provides a sense of happy superiority and self admi-

ration, kills the loving dependent self and other capacities of it, such as empathy,

forgiveness, and reparation. People that are not deterred by empathy can harm oth-

ers more easily because they experience less or no personal – empathic – suffering

at all as they witness the pain they caused; furthermore, thanks to reiteration of harm

and “desensitization” (through which inhibitions that surround harmful acts are re-

moved), they can more easily develop sadistic attitudes and even experience fun in

harming (Baumeister, 1997, pp. 232–238, 285–291).47

Bollas contends that this process is occurring under the pressure of some particu-

lar intense drives (such as greed), forces (such as envy) or anxieties (for example fear

of mutilation). A kind of doubling of the self is achieved, two functioning wholes

are issued, so that part of the self acts as an entire self. Nazi doctors were killers

and remained ordinary family men: “Nazi doctors escaped the sense of guilt arising

from their evil actions by transferring the guilt from the ordinary to the ‘Auschwitz

self”’ (Bollas, 1993, p. 199): a doubling that it is also occurring at the ordinary level,

47 It has to be said that sometimes empathy can be used to the aim of cruelty, when the violent

human has to know what the victim is feeling in order to maximize his suffering.


for example when a surgeon needs to shift from ordinary human self to the so to say

“aggressive” doctor self, in order to perform operations.48

It is important to bear clearly in mind that the aforementioned doubling of the self

does not coincide with Sartre’s conceptualization of “bad faith” which, put simply,

is a kind of falsehood that involves lying to oneself.49 In the human condition of bad

faith, people treat themselves as means; they tend to ignore or jettison the concept of

choice in some respect because it is somehow vexing or burdensome, and in doing

so they relinquish freedom and externalize responsibility (Magnani, 2007b, p. 128).

Usually, one sinks into bad faith for very specific reasons: for instance, instead of

facing his responsibilities one might fall into bad faith by denying his own interests

if confronted with economic distress, or pretending to be a free and magnanimous

spirit when dealing with an unfaithful partner. This is not the place for a full analysis

of bad faith: let it be enough to remark that bad faith, a condition in which many

people live – alas – all their lives, originates from the unwillingness to adopt a certain

course of action (because of ignorance, fear or other constraints) that would ensure

in the long term a greater happiness, freedom and possession of one’s future. In

short, that person deceives herself by constructing a limited reality that does not take

into account the full range of choices available to her. Of course, with our decisions

we greatly affect each other’s lives, but as far as bad faith is concerned, she is herself

the first and main potential victim: it is from herself that she is hiding the truth; the

deceiver and the deceived coalesce into a single consciousness in a way that must be

distinguished from true mental illness or malfunction of consciousness. It has to be

said that bad faith, weakness of will, and akrasia can all be involved in the process of

moral disengagement described in the previous section, in various interesting ways

which more or less unconsciously affect intentions, decisions/resolutions, (moral)

evaluations, action executions, some of them still awaiting illustration. On some

moral aspects involved in these psychic/mental processes cf. (Holton, 2009; Mele,

2010).

Conversely, as will be showed further on, the Fascist state of mind arises from

a similar but opposite kind of malaise: a moral super-anxiety brought about by the

lack of actual anxieties. Once Nazi rule was established, the reach of ideology was

not restrained by any limitation and having defused the very idea of an actual oppo-

sition (to be engaged in a dialectical confrontation), the hypertrophic narcissist ego

could label anything as an opposition (and therefore a threat and cause of anxiety)

and start yet another annihilating war against it.

Many of those involved in trials for the crimes perpetrated by Nazi Germany (see

the Nuremberg Trials, for instance) defended themselves arguing that they were

just obeying orders: that could be read as the claim that Germany was a whole

nation committed to bad faith, as fear and a sense of individual powerlessness would

inhibit any individual attempt to react against what was going on. Such argument

has always been hardly convincing because bad faith is an extremely individual

48 (Waller, 2002) illustrates, with the help of several examples coming from the twentieth-

century’s “age of genocide”, the role of dispositions, moral disengagement, self-interest,

and situations in transforming ordinary people into actors of genocide.49 (Sartre, 1956).


and chaotic phenomenon: less-than-conscious shifts between different identities can

hardly occur on a mass-scale in perfect synchronization. As bad faith is an answer to

objective anxieties, it makes people’s behavior erratic and often unpredictable. On

the contrary, this further determines Bollas’ point: there was no shift between the

Nazi doctor, concentration-camp guard, “SS” officer and, to follow Bollas’ example,

the family man each of them would embody at home. Furthermore, it can be said

that those double selves perfectly coexisted within one person.50

“The core element in the Fascist state of the mind (in the individual or the group)

is the presence of an ideology that maintains its certainty through the operations

of specific mental mechanisms aimed at eliminating all opposition. But the pres-

ence of ideology (either political, theological, or psychological) is hardly unusual;

indeed it is quite ordinary” (Bollas, 1993, p. 200). I would add that this “ideology”

immediately acquires the features of an ethos, as a cluster of beliefs and convictions

that, furnishing in this special case a total and rigid explanation of human behaviors

and characters, firmly and directly governs the fascist individual’s actions, without

hesitation, negotiations with people who do not share the Fascist state of mind, and

without a serious consideration of any evidence deriving from the environment (it

seems the Fascist state of mind is affected by a dominance of the so-called confir-

mation bias).51

5.3.1 Ideology as a Disguised Violent Ethos

Let us better focus on ideology: it is something available “out there”, stored in

external devices and supports (other people, books, media, etc.) of a given social

collective. People readily pick up external ideological “tools” of this kind, then re-

represent them internally. If we pay attention, we can indeed notice how thinking

about an ideology (be it the Nazi or the Soviet communist, the catholic one or the lib-

eral tolerant) often triggers the evocation of a complex and distinctive aesthetic and

material environment. The signaling – consisting in swastikas, red stars, parades,

styles of speech and even clothing fashions – does not only possess a propagan-

distic meaning, but it mostly enforces and empowers those who already believe in

it. The historical topos about the difference between an army and an armed mob

should be clarifying: it is the army ideology that allows the effective superiority of

the army. It can be argued that even military training is only afforded by the presence

of a distributed ideology embedded in signs, flags, words, hierarchies and, last but

not least, uniforms: the very term uniform is significative. The uniform is the same

for everyone, making every subject feel similar, both exteriorly and psychologically

equal to the others.

That is to say, an ideology could be labeled as a highly reified and sclerotized

moral niche. Morals should be present when dealing with conflicts as the presence

50 It is interesting to recall how the Nazi regime’s propaganda would always stress the ap-

parent normality and joyfulness of the families of those very soldiers and rulers that were

actuating the infamous Ultimate Solution.51 On confirmation bias see below section 5.4.


of a moral presupposes the presence of another conflicting one, but the Fascist state

of the mind rejects this assumption and becomes the ultimate moral. Conflicts are

not a matter of conflict anymore, but of cleansing. The adversary is not even an

adversary anymore, but a mere obstacle to be annihilated and removed. This disen-

gagement is another aspect typical of what we defined “moral bubble”:52 violence

gets dissimulated because the adversaries see their active dialectical role refused.

When you take the trash out, or when you clean the kitchen table or even when you

perform the disinfestation of a building, you do not think you are performing any

violence. Furthermore, you do not need to engage the opposing party as a physical

or dialectical counterpart. This is sound as far as garbage, dirt or infesting vermin

are concerned: we maintain that morals, the presence of an orthodoxy, can act as

an immunizing factor to one’s violence also when the object of violent deeds are

other human beings. Hitler’s “final solution” was more a necessity of hygiene rather

than the elimination of an active threat. Ideologies provide individuals with a series

of tools to avoid the self-emergence of violence: political, theological, biological

arguments as well. If I acknowledge the dialectical role of my adversary, I would be

compelled to consider myself as his adversary. Each of us would be just the other’s

alter ego, and the violence of the confrontation would be plain on both sides. Con-

versely totalitarian ideology-induced moral bubbles (by making me unaware of the

intrinsic violence of my own behavior) lead me to perceive the others’ deeds as

extremely violent on my behalf, thus sparking a collective vicious circle.

Most of these social phenomena need a collectivization to be activated. The pres-

ence of a (large) group is what creates the difference between Adolph Hitler and

Charles Manson.53 Nazi ideals were structured so that they would be received and

adopted by the largest possible number of people: constant external markers, always

at hand, would make the individuals increasingly interiorize the ideology (becoming

in this way less individualized), thus turning themselves into an externalized marker

for other people.

That stated, we can further analyze this dimension that characterizes the moral

bubble and consequently the Fascist state of mind. Ideologies thrive on the fact that

moral bubbles are hardly an individual phenomenon but that they rest on the mu-

tual reinforcement of moral beliefs. Uniformed individuals (the oxymoron is not

meant but very significative), each in their own individual moral bubble, act to-

gether and combine their roughly similar moral belief in a collective moral bubble,

which dramatically empowers its ordinary mechanisms. This collective bubble aims

at systematically defusing all potential doubts, adding the action of one individual

upon another in the process of self-immunization to violence, typical of the moral

bubble. Within the moral bubble, the moral agent perceives his own moral principles

as a given, just as much as a cognitive agent takes his beliefs as a positive, genuine

52 Cf. chapter three, subsection 3.2.2.53 Charles Milles Manson is the infamous american criminal who, in 1969, commanded his

adepts (known as The Family) to brutally slaughter the occupants of a villa in Bel Air (Los

Angeles), as the climax of his bloody vengeance against a society that had made him feel

rejected and unwanted. Among the victims of the carnage was Roman Polanski’s wife, 8

months pregnant at the moment of her death.


truth. Ideologies project a clear coalition level, in which each embubbled individual

assures and corroborates the beliefs of his fellows. The whole ideology-projected

group becomes blind to its own violence and it is able to respond to instances of

doubt with the synchronism of one organism and the power of several. The majority

of the violent response is not a defense of the content of the questioned beliefs, but

of the tranquility that those beliefs allow – within the moral embubblement. A vio-

lent outburst is not perceived by the agent who performs it, because it is obliterated

by the unquestioned conviction of the righteousness of her own principles. That is

why we are extremely aware of other agents’ violence (because they clash with our

own bubble) but we are virtually immunized to our own. In extremis, should it be

impossible to suppress the corrupting belief, the solution rests in the (often physi-

cal but sometimes metaphorical) suppression of the corrupted believer. If violence

perpetrated outside of the group does not succeed in its scope, it can target one of

weakest members of the group itself, labeled as a deviant or a traitor.

In the case of the Fascist state of mind doubts are expelled because they immedi-

ately reverberate weakness of spirit and all weaknesses are considered as something

very negative. A unidimensional mind is formed and any other external counter-

views completely disregarded and eliminated. Slogans, rhetoric, violent fallacious

argumentations, icons and so on substantiate (also suitably stored in external mate-

rialities) the totality of the ideology/morality at play. Bollas eloquently notes this, in

a passage where semiotic and violent issues are intertwined by showing the simpli-

fication performed by the fascist implementation of the mind:

When the mind had previously entertained in its democratic order the parts of the self

and the representatives of the outside world, it was participant in a multifaceted move-

ment of many ideas linked to the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real – Lacan’s terms.

Specifically, words, as signifiers, were always free in the democratic order to link to

any other words, in that famous Lacanian slide of the signifiers which expressed the

true freedom of the unconscious (this Other) to represent itself. But when represen-

tation freedom is foreclosed, signifiers lack this freedom, as ideology freezes up the

symbolic order, words becoming signs of positions in the ideological structure. When

Dukakis tried to introduce complex issues in the American presidential campaign of

1988, George Bush made the word “liberal” a sign of weakness visited upon the certain

mind by doubt and complexity. To supplement his destruction of the symbolic order

Bush made the American flag the sign of the difference between Dukakis and himself;

sadly it signified the end of discourse and the presence of an emergent Fascist state of

the mind (1993, p. 201).

5.3.2 The Fascist “Infinite Morality” as a Violent Moral Void

Of course, following Bollas and his psychoanalytic argumentations, the elimination

of the “symbolic” is a kind of murder: indeed it immediately gives birth to a sense

capable of murder, a sense often related to a happy feeling of an “infinite moral space

[seen] as the pervert’s accomplishment eliminating (at first Oedipal) opposition to


desire and gaining objects without opposition” (p. 202). But the violence related to

this infinite morality deriving from the killing of any opposition54 in turn echoes

a moral void, analogous – psychoanalytically – to the empty heart of the pervert.

Quickly, the moral void created by the destruction of the opposition begins to make

its presence felt:

[. . . ] at this point the subject must find a victim to contain that void, and now the state

of mind becomes an act of violence. On the verge of its own moral vacuum, the mind

splits off this dead core self and projects it into the victim henceforth identified with

that moral void. To accomplish this transfer, the fascist mind transforms the human

other into a disposable nonentity, a bizarre mirror transference of what has already

occurred in the fascist’s self experience (p. 203).

Let us consider the unconscious cognitive operations that are occurring in the

process: 1) moral void is expelled by symbolically and/or actually killing the victim,

2) this destructive process is immediately denied by a “delusional narcissism” issued

thanks to an “annihilation of negative hallucinations”, 3) such annihilation enables

an idealization of self already accomplished by the negation of any alternative self

or environment (these would be just considered enviable or persecutory). We have to

imagine these fascist minds as always thinking about themselves as contaminated,

in need of an activity of constant purging so that a (forever) empty, aseptic, and pure

self can arise (a self that does not have to have contacts with others, without past,

and with a “future that is entirely of its own creation”).

Bollas significantly adds that “[. . . ] we can find this phenomenon, however, in

ordinary life, whether it be spoken by those who attempt the position of pure Chris-

tianity, pure objectivity, pure science, or dare I say, pure analysis!” (pp. 204–205).

The moral atmosphere generated by this phenomenon is clear and so is its imme-

diate violent counterpart, any opposition is simply not considered, or more or less

violently assaulted. The degree of the annihilation of the opposition depicts the delu-

sional narcissistic level of the Fascist state of the mind. When the purity is seen as

challenged beyond a certain threshold, a state of perennial struggle is implemented,

like in the case of Mussolini and his followers’ mentality. The words of Mussolini

are very clear

War alone keys up all human energies to their maximum tension and sets the seal of

nobility on those peoples who have the courage to face it. [. . . ] Fascism carries this

anti-pacifistic attitude into the life of the individual (Mussolini, 1935).

Another sentence attributed to him is: “War is to man what maternity is to a

woman. From a philosophical and doctrinal viewpoint, I do not believe in perpetual

peace”. A male maternity, Bollas psychoanalytically says, that reverberates death

camps as deadly wombs, where adults reduced to bizarre fetuses are eventually

killed!

54 This sense of infinite morality instantly guarantees impunity, we know it is a decisive

factor – together with fear – for translation to “barbarity”.


Moreover, the morality of this state of continuous struggle, so to say, is no combat

at all, it is not the combat of negotiations, of dialogues, it is not the continuous – for

example “democratic” – engagement with adversarial opinions and with the “differ-

ent” problems of diverse people: instead, these are considered on the whole a kind

of illness, of cancer, to be eliminated: “The idealization of war and of the warrior is

a call to a state of mind that rids itself of opposition by permanent violence” (Bollas,

1993, p. 206). A process of de-personalization accompanies the process: ideology,

a leader, the state, the king are revered also to the end of murdering the self: “Thus

the concentration camp, a metaphor of the psychic process of Fascism, is the place

where, as the humane parts of the self are dehumanized and then exterminated, the

death work is idealized in the death workers who cleanse the body politic of the unde-

sirables” (p. 206). The leader (and the various equivalents, God, state, etc.) morally

incarnates and represents the higher “cause” that the fascist mentality always uses

to explain and justify what the non-fascistic minds see as mere anti-human violent

behaviors; it also provides the basis for constructing that typical grandiosity “that

achieves nobility” by rising above the standard human beings, rotting in the sub-

morality of weak people. It is thanks to this grandiosity that the person that is in the

Fascist state of mind thinks of himself as making happy violence, as I have indicated

in the title of this section. Happy because it morally purifies everything through ex-

citing enterprises.55

5.3.3 Intellectual Genocide: Killing Opponents’ Cognitive Niches

In chapter two, section 2.1.4, I have said that vocal and written language is a tool

“exactly like a knife”. No better evidence of this role played by language is pro-

vided than by the rhetorical tools exploited by the Fascist state of mind to “kill” all

opposition. I can say this is the first way of creating that more or less unconscious

“sense of murdering” I have mentioned above.

Various kinds of the so-called fallacious arguments are used, also to provide those

symptoms I personally consider real “alarms” through which it is possible to abduce

the emergence of the Fascist state of mind: Bollas lists some of the main efficacious

cases, which he eloquently considers as the tools for a possible intellectual geno-

cide, which is considered as a real, new and important “category of crime”. A subset

55 Charny (2006) further illustrates the fascist mentality by analyzing the mental processes

related to the complex patterns of behavior referred to as fascist and democratic. Still, fas-

cism and democracy are not only political systems but ways of organizing the mind. They

arise out of basic human needs at two very different stages of development. “the fascist

paradigm”, according to Charny, “is a model for attempting to solve existential anxieties

that trouble all human beings” (p. 17). A democratic mind, by contrast, “recognizes that

what life is all about, first of all, is the sanctity of human life. [It] takes an overriding posi-

tion of caring for life and the opportunity for life as the definitive prime principle” (p. 136).

Charny also suggests new principles and approaches for individual and family therapy as

well, with the aim of reducing the danger of future war, genocide, and terrorism.


of these is the group of rhetorical methods which substantiate what he calls the

committive genocide:56

1. distortion of the opponent’s image, for example using a massive quantity of ad

hominen;

2. decontextualization of the opposing view: this phenomenon is in turn linked

to the scapegoat mechanism (which often relies on gossiping dynamics) that I

have already illustrated in the previous chapters of this book. Bollas also adds

that “The extreme of this act is the removal of a victim from his tribe, home (i.e.

context), isolated for purposes of persecution” (Bollas, 1993, p. 208);

3. denigration, depicting the opponent’s position as ridiculous;

4. caricature, which helps delineate and identify the group or the ideas that have

to be considered undesirable and so “killed”;

5. change of name, as an act of the elimination of proper names (“kikes” for Jews,

“gooks” for Vietnamese – for two decades the current Italian prime minister has

made an annoying but efficacious and aggressive use of the word “communist”

to indicate simply democratic or Christian-democratic people, and in turn he has

been nicknamed by his adversaries as “the dwarf” for his short size, in a bitter

escalation of calling each other names). It is pretty obvious that this elimination

reverberates the subsequent potential elimination of the people/ideas from the

socio-political scene and in the worst case from the very “community of living

people”;57

6. categorization as aggregation, when the individual is transferred to a general

category, usually with a bad connotation, in which he loses his identity and

qualities: “he is a psychopath”, “he is an immigrant”, “he is a former alcoholic”.

Cases of omittive genocide resort to the absence of reference when the life, work,

or culture of an individual or group is intentionally not referred to. Of course this

56 Salmi (2009) usefully lists the various effects of genocide under the category of alienating

violence, when a person is deprived of her rights to emotional, cultural and intellectual

growth, by means of racism, social ostracism and ethnocide. This has to be distinguished

from repressive violence, which resorts to a mere deprivation of basic rights other than

the right to survival and protection from injury, including civil, political, and social rights

(Bufacchi, 2009, p. 320).57 Other processes of methodical “substitution” (especially active in the case of National-

sozialistische Deutsche Arbeitepartei, were related to: 1) the substitution of religion by the

instrumentalization of art, 2) the substitution of art by propaganda, 3) the substitution of

propaganda by indoctrination, 4) the substitution of culture by monumentalism, 5) the sub-

stitution of politics by esthetics, 6) the substitution of esthetics by terror (masses – already

transformed into an homogenous conglomeration where the elbow room that would enable

any political or cultural relation is missing – are further weakened through the erasure of

the very faces – metaphorically, aiming toward a total anonymization – and any sense of

individual responsibility) (Mandoki, 1999).


is an ordinary tool that, when performed systematically and constantly against well

chosen targets, can be both at the basis of the Fascist state of the mind and

a simple tool in the subtle violent dynamics of everyday life, a la “Desperate

Housewives”.

To be simple and clear from the perspective of the philosophy of violence: here in

this subsection I am not referring to the more or less legitimate desire of the fascist

(and of all human beings) to win against others, to become richer, or to acquire

power and command, but to the extremely violent and harmful tools he uses that,

because of their radical character, always surpass in cruelty the tools used by the

opponents which are less violent and so “constitutively ” weaker if compared with

those used by the fascist.

This consideration also clearly explains the rapid implementation of a “virtuous”

circle of violence in the process of formation of a “collective” Fascist state of mind.

All opposition, that the germinal Fascist state of the mind violently58 depicts as weak

and with the stigmas of doubt and complexity (like the way George Bush thought

of the “liberals”, as I said above), quickly actually becomes weak, doubtful, and

vulnerable to everyone embedded in that very opposition and so perceived as weak

by the collectivity dominated by the Fascist state of the mind.

In this interplay intellectual genocide may occur: usually the victims adopt few

kinds of vaguely reactive behaviors 1) some people respond by not engaging in

vicious gossip or trying to stop it; 2) others can simply leave the scene, no longer

partaking of the group and so exiling themselves; 3) other can further express more

radical views, so offering themselves up to further victimization and scapegoating;

4) some may somatize the violence received in physical or nervous disfunctions; 5)

finally, others might try to form alliances with the persecutors to gain some form of

protection. Bollas contends that intellectual genocide should be considered a crime

against humanity and no less relevant than the sanguinary genocides. In the light

of the analysis of the violent nature of language I have provided in chapter two, I

cannot abstain from agreeing with him.

Finally, it is useful to remember that the persecutors who are in a Fascist state

of the mind can also rapidly become object of endearment “to those who other-

wise – one would have thought – would be horrified by such a behavior” (Bollas,

1993, p. 210). Usually we tend to “love” these – now cute – “monstrous monsters”

(a kind of impossible object of love) because love here exonerates us from explicit

and responsible opposition: for example aggression is turned into humor, or into a

perverse joke, for example we pathetically say: “removed from her pulpit, she is

really quite a different person, she is a very nice person”. Unfortunately, in such

a way the “humane authorizes the inhumane in an exchange between the Fascis-

tic and the non-Fascistic part of the personality” (p. 221), which establishes a kind

of vicious circle of justification of violence. On the contrary, it would seem more

58 However, we have to remember that for the fascist mind this is a moral duty, and violence

is rarely perceived thanks to the huge generated moral bubble.


non-Fascistic to try to avoid the tricks able to control our anguish and so to recu-

perate from the trauma caused by facing a person who is in the Fascist state of the

mind, and instead frankly experience the violence received in all its force. Indeed,

being a non-Fascistic listener of the words that erupt from a Fascist state of the mind

immediately transforms us in victims, and nobody likes to clearly see herself like a

victim, so she easily and immediately looks for some relief. As listeners we feel

“shocked, dissociated, and deadened [. . . ] we share elements in common with those

who are more severely traumatized by socially operant Fascism”:

We all know how stunning it is, when discussing an issue with someone, to witness the

person’s vicious espousal of a doctrine that derives part of its energy from the intellec-

tual annihilation of the other. We may be speechless. Such a rupture also occasions a

sense of dissociation: we feel immediately separated out from the conversant’s insan-

ity. And following this dissociation, part of us will feel deadened by the eruption, as

now it is clear to us that the other is subject to an internal Fascistic process. In a way

our response is our victimage (p. 213).

It is clear: our mute reaction is already our violent victimage.

Certainly related to this fascistic aspect is the general aggressive component of

the so-called “conversational dominance”, which asymmetrically establishes an un-

equal distribution of entitlements and rights, such as the opportunity to introduce

new topics, and verbally victimizes some participants.59

The emphasis on the role of fallacious argumentation in the formation of the Fas-

cist state of the mind can easily explain how abusive “manipulations” in discourse

interaction at the social level (through written text, speech, and visual messages)

are important in totalitarian states and collectivities but also in professional settings,

institutions, families, etc. They are violent tools used by dominants to establish in-

equalities of various types and possibly to perform intellectual genocide, when they

achieve their absolute target of annihilating opponents. Van Dijk lists the major ar-

gumentative and structural tools that are involved in manipulation processes, which

are almost always devoted to focusing on those cognitive and social characteristics

of the recipient that make them more vulnerable and less resistant:

(a) Incomplete or lack of relevant knowledge – so that no counter-arguments can be

formulated against false, incomplete or biased assertions. (b) Fundamental norms, val-

ues and ideologies that cannot be denied or ignored. (c) Strong emotions, traumas, etc.

that make people vulnerable. (d) Social positions, professions, status, etc. that induce

people into tending to accept the discourses, arguments, etc. of elite persons, groups

or organizations. These are typical conditions of the cognitive, emotional or social

situation of the communicative event, and also part of the context models of the par-

ticipants, i.e. controlling their interactions and discourses. [. . . ] [Moreover, discourse

59 (McKinlay and McVittie, 2008, chapter eight: “Dispute and aggression”) also study the

role of insults as precursor of physical aggression in their intertwining with arguments that

can be used to establish sociability.


structures materialize suitable constraints which favor manipulations:] (a) Emphasize

the position, power, authority or moral superiority of the speaker(s) or their sources

– and, where relevant, the inferior position, lack of knowledge, etc. of the recipients.

(b) Focus on the (new) beliefs that the manipulator wants the recipients to accept as

knowledge, as well as on the arguments, proofs, etc. that make such beliefs more ac-

ceptable. (c) Discredit alternative (dissident, etc.) sources and beliefs. (d) Appeal to

the relevant ideologies, attitudes and emotions of the recipients (2006, pp. 375–376).

5.3.4 Culture of Hatred and Inculcation, and the Moral

“Banality of Evil”

It is clear that a component of intellectual genocide can be a culture of hatred and

inculcation, that of course is not simply a characteristic of the Fascist state of mind

and of the related historical counterparts, but which is also more or less violently

active in many everyday ways of reasoning and feeling, for example when myths

and ideologies are morally efficient at the level of the individual psyche. Following

Wieviorka (2009, p. 119) we can say that Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil refers to

the fact that human beings behave in extreme violent ways without feeling or know-

ing what they are doing, but not necessarily being motivated by hatred or any other

passion. Eichmann, she says, was “terrifyingly normal”. For example, if we harm

people by obeying to the order of a political authority, like in the case of the Nazis,

we can do it without passion, e.g. pleasure or sadistic or cruel intents, but I believe

that, even if horrible passions are present, this fact does not diminish the moral at-

mosphere in which the perpetrator of violence thinks her action is performed: if an

agent takes pleasure in enacting something that he morally approves of, the better

for him!

Servility and conformity to peers and social norms as a pervasive reason of moral

transgression (or of a disengagement of morality, as I say)60 is fully analyzed by

Freiman (2010). The author also contends that servile behavior involves cognitive

dissonance,61 which can restructure or dissolve those particular desires, beliefs, and

projects that fund the agent’s most highly valued conceptions of herself. In this

perspective it is easy to see how self-interest cannot serve as a comprehensive ex-

planation of “immorality”: humans sometimes disengage morality at the knowing

expense of their personal interests, they are – often hypocritically – occasionally

“too cooperative”. The famous experiments devised by Milgram, which eloquently

showed human inclination towards disengaging morality, are also described: “[. . . ]

few people have the resources needed to resist authority. A variety of inhibitions

against disobeying authority come into play and successfully keep the person in his

60 Cf. above section 5.1.61 Cf. above subsection 5.1.1.


place” (1975, p. 6). Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment (Zimbardo, 2009) is

also illustrated.62

A “normal” sadistic Nazi is not “less banal” that a non-sadistic one! Putting aside

the cases of violence triggered by various kinds of madness,63 from depressive sui-

cidal to sadistic psychopathologic people, we can simply see that aggressiveness

in both a surgeon and a Nazi is motivated by moral concerns, but we do not con-

sider the first one violent (when both of those people consider their own aggressive

behavior to be moral and the second one does not see the violence we see in his

behavior! – again, “banality of evil”).64

In a sense, the banality of evil is the supposed morality of evil, given the fact an

agent acts based on a conscious self-perceived moral deliberation, possibly resort-

ing to important and dominant ideologies and principles, like the Nazi ones. The

title of this chapter is “Multiple Individual Moralities May Trigger Violence”: in

this perspective the life of what we label – in our philosophical framework – a vi-

olent subject, surely is “no more than a sequence of multiple, disparate, processes.

Each of them is partial, and therefore ready and able to argue that it is morally not

62 Further data on the culture of blind obedience to the orders of total institutions, which op-

erationalize moral submission, and its impact on moral disengagement (and the consequent

banalisation/moralization of violence) are provided by (Pina et al., 2010): where events in

Democratic Kampuchea (i.e. Cambodia under the regime of Pol Pot) are addressed and

illustrated in detail (on the related connections between demographic concerns and critical

geopolitics of violence cf. (Tyner, 2009)). (Elbert et al., 2010) further stress how hunting

behavior is fascinating to human beings and how it is easy to reengage it, for example in

unfavorable environments (e.g. scenarios involving the presence of child soldiers), thus

promoting the development of personalities which appear to be cruel “by nature”: “While

a breakdown of the inhibition towards intra-specific killing would endanger any animal

species, controlled inhibition was enabled in humans in that higher regulatory systems,

such as frontal lobe-based executive functions, to prevent the involuntary derailment of

hunting behaviour. If this control – such as in child soldiers for example – is not learnt,

then brutality towards humans remains fascinating and appealing. Blood must flow in or-

der to kill. It is hence an appetitive cue as is the struggling of the victim. Hunting for men,

more rarely for women, is fascinating and emotionally arousing with the parallel release

of testosterone, serotonin and endorphins, which can produce feelings of euphoria and

alleviate pain”.63 There is no room for direct moral considerations in these processes of violence which

just appear “for the sake of violence”, because the action is out of the reach of a standard

conscious deliberation.64 Empirical results show that, in western countries, psychopathic behavior has a fundamen-

tal impact on violence among the general population, despite its low incidence. Impul-

sivity is not found to be as uncontrollable as previously thought and it does not strictly

depend upon an antisocial lifestyle, so that in criminal psychopaths the “instrumentality”

of homicide simply prevails (Coid and Yang, 2010). On the complex relationships between

psychopathy and sexual sadism cf. (Mokros et al., 2011): the authors skeptically conclude

that, currently, it is unclear whether the deficiencies in emotional processing that predis-

pose psychopaths and sexual sadists toward instrumental violence are cognitive or affective

or both. According to the authors, it is still to be clarified whether these deficits represent

a lack of understanding or a lack of feeling.


guilty” (Wieviorka, 2009, p. 119). It is not simply that our supposed-to-be-violent

agent argues that she is morally not guilty. It is even – so to say – worse, she thinks

she directly acts in a “morally” approvable way. The moral bubble that she occupies

guarantees her impermeability to the possibility of facing her behavior’s violent out-

comes, which are morally justified so deeply that they simply cannot be “actually”

considered or perceived as violent. Recently Balch and Armstrong (2009) have re-

covered the idea of banality of wrongdoing to explain persistent, accepted-as-normal

corporate wrongdoing, particularly for high performance organizations. The estab-

lishment of a “cocoon” of a supposed to be “new morality” of the group is the tool

which leads to the banality of wrongdoing. The empirical study describes five ex-

planatory variables: the culture of competition, ends-biased leadership, missionary

zeal, legitimizing myth, and the corporate cocoon. The conclusion is that the na-

ture of competition generates both legitimate and illegitimate goal-seeking to adopt

an iconoclastic (rule-breaking) orientation. High performance organizations are es-

pecially inclined to wrongdoing because achieving top performance commands ag-

gressive behavior at the margins of what is normally acceptable. The way leadership

reacts to competition permits various “ethical” cultures to develop: “ends-biased

leadership will project strong vision, using ideology and legitimizing myth as tools

to inspire and motivate. The resulting missionary zeal justifies using questionable

means because of the perceived value of the end. One critical method for building

strong culture is creating a sense of being separate and apart from the ordinary. This

cocoon effect may create a self-referential value system that is significantly at odds

with mainstream culture and in which wrongdoing is banal” (p. 292).

Other simple traits of violent states of the mind are illustrated by Wieviorka

(2009, pp. 151–157): they correspond to

1. the floating subject (the individual experiences her negation – as a potential

“desubjectivation” and loss of meaning and socialization – as something intol-

erable, for example because of a police “blunder”, like in the case of the famous

Los Angeles gang riots’ reaction), a fragmentary and fleeting morality tries to

reconstruct the threatened self building up – through violence – a different cul-

tural environment;

2. the hyper-subject finds in ideologies, cultures, and religions plenty of “mean-

ings”, which help self-assertion and the ownership of one’s destiny (terrorists,

revolutionaries for example): this aims at establishing a new social and political

order and justifies violence, while if subordinate and passive, this same subject

can easily shift to a kind of

3. non-subject, who is merely obeying to authority, or to a kind of

4. anti-subject, who is not attached to any particular ideology or social relationship

and her practice of violence is – so to say – more “animal”, related to pleasure

and often to a sadistic or sadomasochistic attitude, which constitutes the only

way of building social relationships and of giving them a subjective moral sense.

Often this “morality” is actually constructed as a kind of trained and explicit


anti-morality65 mainly built on clusters of passions and feelings. The other’s

existence is typically denied as a subject;

5. the survivor-subject aims at self-preservation and follows the archaic-

fundamental (Bergeret, 1995) violent morality deriving from an overemphasis

of “the other or me?” or “survival or death”, a kind of primitive narcissism. It

was occurring for instance in the case of the recent Paris’ banlieues riots, where

young people’s violence derived also from the failure of their adult counterparts,

that proved unable to offer adequate models with which they could identify.

5.3.5 Evil and Trauma

Finally, the relationship between the disengagement of morality and the interplay

between trauma/evil in the perspective of some psychoanalytic reflections must not

be disregarded, inasmuch as it sheds further light on the relationship between moral-

ity and violence, also with respect to the fascist state of the mind I illustrated ear-

lier in this book. Obviously, the psychoanalytic narratives about evil rarely clearly

disclose the “moral” underside of behaviors, which on the other hand I certainly

consider relevant. Psychoanalysts, used to performing therapies, abstain from moral

considerations. Nevertheless their narratives, once transformed in cultural objects

externalized out there in a non-therapeutic intellectual communication, tend to attest

to a sense of fake moral neutrality concerning the agents involved in the narratives.

In this way those narratives can appear in complicity with the presumption of a fake

and innocent morality of any listener/reader. Briefly, the vividness of violence they

often contemplate and describe is frequently relinquished, because it merely remains

absorbed in the “psychic” dimension. This can reinforce the reader/listener’s malig-

nant moral bubble (cf. chapter three, subsection 3.2.2), favoring the obfuscation of

the responsibility of his own destructiveness.

I said in chapter one – quoting Hannah Arendt – that human beings experience a

pervasive difficulty in understanding perpetrators of evil. In spite of its clearly stated

disinterest for moral judgment, psychoanalysis is very clear about this point. From

a Kleinian psychoanalytic perspective the explanation of this fact is very easy and

still related to what I have called, in a cognitive perspective, the “moral bubble”:

our unfitness to identify with a character we recognize to be evil is related to our

unfitness to acknowledge our own destructiveness (Schapiro, 2002).

If, in the oedipal interpretation of Othello, Iago (the incarnation of Satan) (Snow,

1980) is not related to the dark impulsive id but rather to a punitive super-ego,

a question arises: where is the source of this morality which compels Othello to

punish Desdemona? Still in Kleinian terms, the violent punishment is related to

a catastrophic trauma, which generates envy and aggression, as an effort to man-

age depressive anxiety and the related sense of loneliness caused by the trauma

itself. Thus, envy and aggressions can be performed through pathological narcis-

sistic modalities, where terror and defense work together: of course defense in-

volves a reshaping of the good original morality to defend it (because it has been

65 With respect to the current morality, available to the agent.


jeopardized by the trauma), through the performance of related punishments, which

aim at counteracting depressive anxiety.

A similar perspective is nicely and further explored by Bollas (1995), who dis-

cusses Milton’s Satan as “[. . . ] having experienced not simply a loss of a paradisal

place but a catastrophic annihilation of his position. Ruptured from the folds of nur-

turance, the Satanic subject bears a deep wound and good is presented now as an

enviously delivered offering” (p. 184). Evil is substantiated as the nature and effect

of trauma and illuminates “[. . . ] how loss of love and catastrophic displacement can

foster an envious hatred of life mutating into an identification with the anti-life”

(ibid.) A new, reengaged morality works together with this identification with the

anti-life, to repay the loss of the previous good morality.

Chapter seven of Bollas’ book Cracking Up: The Work of Unconscious Experi-

ence (1995), entitled “The Structure of Evil”, begins with a description of the nar-

cissistic trauma and the related emotional abandonment/wound/deception/betrayal:

it is the reorganization of trauma that substantiates the structure of evil. Genocide

(which is psychoanalytically exemplified by serial killing) repeats the same struc-

ture: the serial killer distills the power of his trauma, through which – in Milton’s

terms – his paradise was lost.66 A serial killer is “someone who has been allego-

rized: he is squeezed into an identification with one quality, evil, that obliterates

other psychic qualities [. . . ]. He identifies with the force of trauma and out of this

fate develops a separate sense of the work of trauma, which, like Lucifer, he turns

into his profession: squeezing others into his frame of reference” (pp. 218–219).

Moreover, we humans can recognize evil within ourselves not because evil is a part

of our instinctual nature but because, as Bollas argues, “we all have experienced

shocking betrayals in an otherwise trustworthy parental environment” and because

[. . . ] we all have transformations to the allegorical plane when we identify with the

force of a feeling – in the case of evil, the force of emptiness sponsored in our selves by

the shock and its unconscious marriage with the destructive sides of our personalities.

All of us have experienced this trauma, and we all know its structure. Each of us will

in some respects subsequently identify with it, mesh it with mental valorizations of our

own sadisms, and entertain its future in fantasy – when we are cruel to each other, or in

the so-called practical joke, when we play to unfortunate (but usually not disastrous)

effects on the other (p. 220).

In the most horrifying cases, the entire emotional ego has been lost, or “killed”

(Bollas, reporting the words of a murderer, speaks of an “emotional death”), like

in the case of violent serial killers, and the psychological – and at the same time

moral defense (a moral defense which is often consciously perceived as right and

justified by the subject himself) – is performed though violent acts. Psychoanaly-

sis rejoins psychology, sociology and criminology, in stressing the absence of any

empathy which is always seen in violent psychopaths. Repudiated love becomes

66 Similarly, women traumatically battered by their male partners in a sadomasochistic in-

terplay return to be victimized again and again to continually re-create and loose that

comforting and caring atmosphere of their infancy which suddenly became jeopardized

by a trauma, then restored, and so on. But these women are not always killed, they can

“survive” this continuous remastering of an early trauma (Bollas, 1995, pp. 206–210).


hatred and resentment,67 which triggers moral vengeance against untrustworthy peo-

ple (and often also against values, objects, institutions). Here it is worth quoting

Bollas again, in his contention that the serial killer “develops a separate sense of the

work of trauma, which, like Lucifer, he turns into his profession: squeezing others

into his frame of reference”. The unwanted self, fruit of the injuring trauma, which

destroyed the moral/nurturing self or the “true” self, is projected outside, to denigrate

and slaughter others, provoking an equivalent failure. In fact, at first, serial killers

present to their victims a kind of parental care, a charming environment of trust,68

that – suddenly and together with a kind of catastrophic disillusion – they reverse

to sanguinary violence, to reverberate their subjective drama: “The serial killer – a

killed self – seems to go on ‘living’ by transforming other selves into similarly killed

ones, establishing a companionship of the dead” (Bollas, 1995, p. 189). As I have al-

ready pointed out, this is often subjectively “morally” perceived as normal, just, and

appropriate. The serial killers sacrifice the victims to their own killing trauma, and

paradoxically, the emotional death due to the trauma is resurrected (“comes back to

life”) in a transmuted form as a new (more or less literal) necrophilic empathy with

the dead body of the victim, which is often cut, raped, inspected or simply mourned.

Sacrifice, as always, grants the return to a non excited state, as Girard contends.69

Energetic moral anticathexes70 are at play:

67 This conception has been often reflected in popular culture as well, and can be thus said

to be part of western cultural unconscious: consider for instance the Who’s famous song

Behind Blue Eyes, released in 1971 in the album Who’s Next. The lyrics echo the thoughts

of an emotionally dead man facing hatred and constantly dismissing his true identity and

a pain for which he blames somebody else: the chorus fittingly exemplifies the idea of a

will to recover from the trauma (“But my dreams / They aren’t as empty / As my con-

science seems to be”) and yet the impossibility to fully achieve this recovery because of

the compulsory need for vengeance (“I have hours, only lonely / My love is vengeance /

That’s never free”).68 I agree with Bollas that it can be hypothesized that an “empty-headed other”, trapped in

the necessary primitive belief about the goodness of the others, so fundamental to life, that

offers himself disarmed and trusting to other people, is an important part of the structure

of evil. This condition is obviously exciting (in a kind of pathologic narcissism) to the

aggressor, who erotically identifies in the other the loyal, alive child he was before the

trauma, to be killed sooner or later.69 Cf. chapter two, subsection 2.1.5, this book.70 Anticathexis, according to Freud, is the energy derived from the super-ego to run the ego.

The investment of energy in an object, idea, or person is known as cathexis. The function

of the anticathexis is to restrict and block cathexis from the id for overall benefit; in such

a way the ego can also act to block unacceptable actions from the id. This is known as an

anticathexis and acts to block or suppress cathexes from being utilized. A typical example

of anticathexis is the process of repression. Repression serves to keep undesirable actions,

thoughts, or behaviors from coming into conscious awareness. However, repressing these

unwanted id urges takes a considerable investment of energy. Because there is only so

much energy available, the other processes may be shortchanged by the energy use of

the anticathexes: it is in this way that, sometimes the super-ego disguises its reasons as

anticathexes with the scope of bypassing the ego and presents as an irresistible impulse

something which clearly is not.

5.4 The Fascist Arguer and His Fallacious Dimensions 219

Some serial killers have reported the urge to kill like some horrid force that takes

them over, but we may wonder if this isn’t testimony to their vain effort to separate

themselves from instinctual life itself, which is now mixed with its own anticathexes,

forming a matrix of instinctuality and its killing, a pathologic combination of the life

and death instincts. Confusing the object of desire with the source of the instinct, the

killer destroys the object in order to be returned to a state of non excitation (pp. 196–

197).

The psychoanalytic framework I described can be usefully applied to the case

of terrorist acts, either performed internationally, internally, or by the states them-

selves: it seems that they “evoke anxiety and insecurity and can provoke collective

narcissistic defenses. If we understand the malignity that Iago represents – the ag-

gressive envy that attacks the good because it is good – as more responsive than

instinctual, then our attention is directed to the social conditions that ignite and sus-

tain such regressive fury” (Schapiro, 2002, p. 497). For example, state terror (and

other forms of political evil, such as the hatred performed by the fascist state of

the mind I have described above) undermines, with anger and rage (which relate

to a sense of moral betrayal) the deep-rooted human assumptions about safety and

comfort, originating in the relationship with parents, thus leading to a collapse of

cooperation.

5.4 The Fascist Arguer and His Fallacious Dimensions

One of the main claims put forward by the “military intelligence” hypothesis is that

arguments can be used as weapons in conflicts. More precisely, violent argumenta-

tions can certainly be part of the arsenal not only in peaceful times, but also during

explicit conflicts. Indeed, words are not swords, but words can subtly support violent

aggression and oppression. The connection between argumentation and violence is

made explicit in the case of the Fascist state of mind. The fascist arguer is an ex-

ample of how reasoning can serve the purpose of suppressing any opposition by

resorting to some argumentative sophistication. Fascist reasoning is a set of argu-

ments – mainly fallacious from an intellectual perspective – deliberately setting the

stage for oppression and violence. As mentioned in subsection 5.3.3 above, Bollas

accounted for a number of argumentative moves which fairly describe the fascist

arguer: distortion, decontextualization, denigration, caricature, character assassina-

tion, change of name, and categorization as aggregation. The list he made is quite

exhaustive, and it immediately puts on display the fallacious dimension of the fas-

cist arguer, as each of the arguments listed above corresponds to a specific type of

“fallacious” reasoning that we are going to deal with in detail.

Generally speaking, there are two main elements describing the kind of reasoning

we called fascist. The first is a propagandist element and the second is a gossiping

one. The two elements go hand in hand, indeed, as they support the same aim:

destroying all opposition.


5.4.1 Negating the Truth

The first element illustrates the attitude the fascist arguer has toward truth. Indeed,

an element of military intelligence is still present, even though it is more directed

toward the construction of a biased truth: here we may use the term “doctrine”. Ac-

cording to Griffiths (1990) a doctrine 1) is expressed in natural-language sentences

and 2) it is a set of descriptive claims about values and things in the world. The

connection with the linguistic aspects of a doctrine is relevant in order to make an

interesting connection with reasoning: in the case of the fascist arguer a doctrine is

reasoned out so as to oppress and suppress any information, truth or fact opposing

the credibility of the fascists’ claim about the world. In doing so, the fascist arguer

deploys a number of arguments, which go under the broad category of a fallacious

reasoning known as “the one-sidedness fallacy”.

The first to highlight this kind of faulty reasoning was John Stuart Mill who wrote

in his On Liberty:

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be

good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to

refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much know what they are, he

has no ground for preferring either opinion.

In that passage, Mill pointed out that a good argument is the one in which a

person seriously considers evidence or facts that might invalidate her claim. That is,

in order to strengthen her claim, she has to provide or include an effective rebuttal

anticipating possible objections of the opposing part (Damer, 2000). Suber (1998)

posited that the fallacious nature of this argument does not rest on the fact that the

premises are false or irrelevant, but that they are incomplete, and – most of all – the

incompleteness is not properly addressed, when it should and could be.

The following passage illustrates how Mill described those who commit the one-

sidedness fallacy:

[. . . ] they have never thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think

differently from them, and considered what such persons may have to say; and con-

sequently they do not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doctrine which they

themselves profess (Mill, 1985, p. 99).

The selective nature of the one-sidedness fallacy is also taken into account by

the so-called confirmation bias. Generally speaking, the confirmation bias is the

tendency exhibited by humans to overlook falsifications in favor of confirmations

and, at the same time, only accept data or information supporting a certain view. So,

the confirmation bias is linked to the illusion produced by the epistemic bubble, that

makes us completely blind and also immune to certain facts that are inconsistent and

overtly in contrast with our conclusions. The confirmation bias is usually triggered

by cognitive dissonance71– the situation in which the agent upholds two cognitions

that are inconsistent (Cooper, 2007). Confirmation bias is the mechanism that is

71 Already mentioned in chapter three, subsection 3.2.1.


meant to solve an internal contradiction by suppressing one of the two conflicting

cognitions, hence it also favors the process of embubblement.

Both the one-sidedness fallacy and confirmation bias are intrinsic elements illus-

trating an important aspect of the fascist arguer, and his attitude toward truth. That

is, he simply negates and suppresses any fact or evidence that might contradict his

convictions. The negation of any opposing fact or evidence may be of two kinds.

First of all, it may resort to deception and manipulation. This is what Van Dijk

(2006) called “discourse power abuse”. Basically, the negation of counter-evidence

is achieved by drawing attention to specific pieces of information instead of oth-

ers, thus taking advantage of information asymmetry, which is usually due to the

unequal access to knowledge.

The victims of such a manipulation lack the proper knowledge in order to debunk

what they are told. The suppression of any fact questioning the accepted view is

facilitated by the absence of any counterpart representing a view that would bring

up the counter-evidence. It is worth noting that in this case there is no need to lie or

distort the facts; those that are brought up to support a certain view are not distorted.

And no lies are necessarily told. The perpetrated fraud is based upon a systematic

and sophisticated omission that hinders understanding.72

It is worth noticing that in the process of hindering understanding, the fascist ar-

guer can also make use of strategies resorting to sophisticated tools like statistics. In

this case the recourse to the argumentative force of “numbers” is indeed fraudulent,

as it relies on tricky manipulations. This is the case of the so-called meaningless

statistics (Walton, 2008, p. 247–251). The fraudulent recourse to statistics is usually

based on the use of a vague term. For instance, one may claim that “9 out of 10

patriots support the war in Iraq”. The number could be true, but the word “patriot”

is ill-defined or, at least, too vague to make the numerical hypothesis meaningful.

The same argument may be used when statistics try to capture a phenomenon for

which it is nearly impossible to have a good or reliable sample. More generally,

meaningless statistics tends to produce bullshit that, however, might turn out to be a

weapon, if used to discredit a certain position.

The negation of any opposing fact may be caused not only by manipulation but

also by explicit suppression. Usually manipulation, and its fallacious nature, is fa-

vored by the absence of a dialectical dimension as in the case, for instance, of the

politician speaking to the crowd or interviewed on TV by an indulgent journalist.

72 As one may obviously notice, understanding can be hindered taking advantage of orga-

nized propaganda. That is, media may play a pivotal role in supporting the systematic

suppression of any idea or evidence conflicting with the accepted doctrine. Manipulations

and distortions perpetrated by crippled media may bias citizens’ understanding and thus

weaken their capabilities to make sense of what is going on and control those who hold the

power. For example, ideological media may convey and contribute to spreading distorted

and biased narratives about the government – especially during electoral competition. This

has the main effect, for instance, of boosting a government’s political agenda, covering

up information that would discredit the policies implemented by the government, and pre-

venting dissident voices from being heard. On the ideological role played by media, see

for instance (Diaz, 2008).


However, the one-sidedness fallacy may also be committed in a dialectical setting

in the presence of a counterpart. In this case, the evidence contrasting the accepted

view is usually mentioned but just to call it into doubt and this strategy relies on the

controversies it manages to generate.

In November 2008 Barack Obama was elected as president of the United States of

America and Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister, – known for his blunt lan-

guage and his ability in making gaffes – declared that he was happy about President

Obama’s election, as – I quote – “Mr. Obama is young, handsome and suntanned”.

Berlusconi was immediately accused of racism and people complained about his

remark. Indeed, that of Berlusconi was a gaffe. However, he refused to apologize

saying that what he said was meant as a compliment. And then he added – I quote

again – “we’d all like to be tanned like Naomi Campbell and Obama”. What did

Berlusconi do? Of course, he could not deny that he made such a remark. He could

not lie about that. He just called into doubt that telling a black person that he is

suntanned is a racist remark. Even worse, he turned the thing the other way around

by claiming that such a remark could actually be a compliment and black people

should be proud of it.

The point here is that Berlusconi was not appointed to decide whether his re-

mark was racist or not, if it was a compliment or just a joke. He simply refused to

accept the common meaning assigned to his remark just because at that moment it

contrasted with his own view.

Consider this other interesting example. In 2003 Berlusconi made quite an offen-

sive statement about Islamic countries. I quote him:

We must be aware of the superiority of our civilization, a system that has guaranteed

well-being, respect for human rights and – in contrast with Islamic countries – respect

for religious and political rights, a system that has as its value understanding of diver-

sity and tolerance.

And then he goes on claiming:

The West will continue to conquer peoples, even if it means a confrontation with an-

other civilization, Islam is firmly entrenched where it was 1,400 years ago.

His statement immediately raised complaints all over the world and, of course,

among the various Islamic associations based in Italy and Europe. In this case, once

again, he refused to apologize claiming that his words were manipulated. This is

what he said in response to his critics:

They have tried to hang me on an isolated word, taken out of context from my whole

speech.

And then he added:

I did not say anything against the Islamic civilization. It’s the work of some people in

the Italian leftist press who wanted to tarnish my image and destroy my long-standing

relations with Arabs and Muslims.

This case is slightly different from the previous one. He did not call into doubt

that his statement was not offensive and aggressive. Actually, he could not do that.


However he did not let the incident rest, but he hit back complaining that he was

misunderstood by the press on purpose. Indeed, it is possible that one’s words can

be taken out of context. But his case was beyond any reasonable doubt, because his

statement could not be misunderstood as the reader can easily see. It is worth noting

here that it is not fallacious to call something into doubt. It is fallacious to attempt at

faking a controversy where there would be no grounds for it. This kind of fallacious

argument can be also called “the appeal to unreasonable doubt”.

We have already mentioned that skepticism is commonly considered as a ratio-

nal attitude according to which a statement should be proved or tested before being

accepted as true or plausible, and we have already illustrated how doubt can be a

weapon that favors both the production of knowledge and ignorance. In the case

of the fascist arguer doubt is instrumentally used to discard certain facts which do

not corroborate the accepted view. Counter-evidence is still negated, but not be-

cause it is appropriately incorporated into the explanatory narrative of the accepted

view, for instance, creating ad hoc explanations: it is simply rejected by claiming

that it is controversial, therefore false. This form of doubting explicitly depicts the

opponent’s view as less credible, when, indeed, the Socratic doubt is not meant

to achieve a certain conclusion, but to invite the reasoner to keep on searching

for a better explanation. As brilliantly argued by Bollas, the depiction of the op-

ponent’s view as less credible is the first move towards “character assassination”

(Bollas, 1993, p. 208).

The one-sidedness fallacy describes the main attitude the fascist arguer has to-

ward truth. As argued so far, it is based on the negation and oppression of any view

alternative to the accepted one, which can be fairly considered as a kind of doctrine,

that is, a set of descriptive claims about the ways of the world. Before introduc-

ing the second category of fallacies describing the fascist arguer, we are going to

introduce a fallacy, which is half way between the two – the so-called “straw man”.

In his brief characterization of what he called “committive genocide”,73 Bollas

pointed out that one of the rhetorical strategies used by the fascist mind is to de-

contextualize the opponent’s view and to make a caricature of it. This serves the

purpose, as briefly mentioned, of rendering the opponent’s argument ridiculous or –

at least – less credible. That, in turn, facilitates the process of character assassina-

tion. From an intellectual perspective, the argumentative move of decontextualizing

and caricaturing one’s view is called straw man.

Generally speaking, a straw man is that kind of (fallacious) reasoning based on

the misrepresentation of an opponent’s argument so as to be in a better position to

knock it down (Walton, 2004). The misrepresentation or caricature serves the pur-

pose of opposing a certain view without taking it seriously. Consequently, it serves

the purpose of diverting the attention to another argument – a caricature or a partial

interpretation – which is easier to oppose both in a rhetorical and dialectical context.

It is usually considered as a fallacy of irrelevance, as it introduces information that

is irrelevant for the discussion of the opponent’s position.74

73 See the previous subsection 5.3.3.74 For a more detailed treatment about relevance and straw man, see (Walton, 2004, pp. 82–84).


Talisse and Aikin (2006) introduce an interesting distinction pointing to two dif-

ferent forms of straw man. The first is related to the way the opponent’s view is

represented, whereas the second is about the selection of the reasons supporting the

opponent’s view. The first form captures the traditional conception of the straw man

we have briefly introduced. In the case of the fascist arguer, a straw man of this kind

is deployed in order to ascribe undesirable qualities to the opponent. The violent

character of this form of reasoning lays on the fact that the opponent is potentially

deprived of the possibility to represent herself, and her arguments, the way she re-

ally wants to. If a person cannot represent her position and have her say in a public

contest or debate, then it follows that what is violated is the freedom of speech.

That is, the fascist attitude emerges in the form of suppressing any representation

contrasting with the fascist’s one. This form of straw man may facilitate what Bollas

called “change of name”. Basically, the distortion of the opponent’s view might lead

to an act of elimination of the proper name – in our case, the original argumentative

representation – which is for Bollas one step away the elimination of the person

himself.

Indeed, this form of straw man is more effective insofar as it is carried out in a

rhetorical context in which the actual opponent is absent. The second form of straw

man is weaker than the first one, and it is more closely related to dialectical situ-

ations. In that case, the misrepresentation or caricature of the opponent’s view is

reached by means of refuting only the weakest reasons behind it. So, basically the

debunking is made easier by avoiding to address the better arguments in opposi-

tion. This argumentative move is more defensive, but violent, as it is still promoting

biased truths by distorting the original version put forward by the opponent.

Another interesting aspect worth citing about the straw man in both its forms is

related to loaded terms. As a matter of fact, natural language is infested by ambi-

guities. Words are not always well-defined, and their domain of application is too

broad. Words can be also interpreted in different ways or in the light of different

standards. The use of a term may also be dependent on the side endorsed by the

speaker. In this sense, words may serve the purpose of military intelligence: the use

and interpretation of a loaded term 1) identifying membership to a group, and 2) re-

flecting the participation, metaphorically speaking, in a coalition on the battlefield.

One who commits a straw man takes advantage of ambiguous and vague terms to

represent (and select) the opponent’s argument in a way that favors his debunking

and rejection or negation. Such a kind of misrepresentation may contribute to the

creation of what Bollas called “categorization as aggregation”. Like in the case of

change of name, negation of the opposition is carried out by means of natural lan-

guage. In the case of categorization as aggregation the loaded term is also used “to

define the moment when the individual is transferred to a mass in which he loses his

identity” (Bollas, 1993, p. 209). An example is the use of the term “anti-patriotic”:

anyone who dares to criticize the government is anti-patriotic. Indeed, in this case

the categorization (being “anti-patriotic”) is a violent attack perpetrated by a straw

man for which all the due distinctions are simply wiped out at once.


5.4.2 Negating the Opponent and Moral Niche Impoverishment

As mentioned at the beginning of this section, there is a second element which il-

lustrates the fascist character of a reasoner: the recourse to harmful and efficacious

gossiping fallacies. What we have described so far is the attitude that the fascist

arguer has towards truth. This attitude basically relies on suppressing any fact or

descriptive claim opposing the accepted view. We have illustrated two types of fal-

lacious reasoning – the one-sidedness fallacy and straw man – that are meant to

constitute the core of the propagandist dimension of the fascist arguer. This subsec-

tion is devoted to describing the types of reasoning the fascist arguer deploys toward

his opponents.

My main take is that the fascist arguer usually commits a number of fallacies

which have been called gossiping fallacies.75 The reference to gossip is meant to

describe a common attitude among reasoners, that is the attitude to connect ideas

emerging in a discussion with people who support them. In doing so, the reasoner

enlarges the basis of his argumentation including information, facts, and claims that

are inherently gossipy, meaning that they are about other people.

Many arguments introducing information related to other people may be easily

identified as fallacious, since they contribute to the discourse with nothing but irrel-

evant information. I will illustrate two examples of gossiping fallacies worth citing

here: the argumentum ad hominem (argument against the person) and the argumen-

tum ad verecundiam (appeal to expert). Each of these two arguments introduces

information that is not usually relevant to the matter in discussion. The argumentum

ad hominem consists in opposing a certain idea by attacking the person or the group

holding it; the argumentum ad verecundiam consists in supporting a certain view by

appealing to somebody recognized as an expert.

The notion of gossiping fallacy clearly captures the military dimension of rea-

soning. As already pointed out in chapter one,76 the use of language – even for

argumentative purpose, as in this case – underpins an activity of coalition enforce-

ment. That is, the reasoner tacitly establishes (or assumes) coalitions in her mind

and refers to them while taking part in a discussion. Even in the most abstract cases,

this military or coalitionist dimension is still present, as the reasoner always ar-

gues simultaneously both with other people and with their ideas. Indeed this is not

to say that, in making up our reasoning, we as people always introduce informa-

tion about those who we argue with. There are plenty of examples in which the

recourse to irrelevant information or facts resulting from gossip is minimized like

in the case of scientific reasoning. However, as a result of a process partly driven

by evolutionary forces, human cognition is biased towards social problem-solving

(Bardone and Magnani, 2010). That is, there is almost always “a sense of positions

in the field” (Collins, 2008, p. 453) that is detected while reasoning.

The reasoner may face up to what Sperber (2010) called a double stake. That

means that the reasoner is supposed to choose between two potentially opposing

alternatives perfectly resumed by the latin motto: amicus Platus, sed magis amica

75 Cf. also (Magnani, 2009; Bardone and Magnani, 2010).76 Cf. subsection 1.3.2.


veritas, “Plato is my friend, but truth is a better friend”. I argue that this is relevant

for stressing the dimension of coalition management emerging in argumentation.

For instance, if a friend of mine – a learned and trusted friend – told me something

I have some doubt about, I actually have a double stake: should I trust my friend?

Or should I reject what he is telling me on the basis of my doubt? Indeed, from an

intellectual perspective, I would agree with Aristotle saying that I should not trust

what my friend told me, even though he is my friend. On the other hand, however,

here a social dimension is clearly emerging that, as a member of a coalition, I should

comply with – a sense of position in the field. The example may appear quite trivial.

But, what if my friend and I were in discussion in a public debate and I did not

want to embarrass him? Sometimes conforming to another’s belief is not necessarily

irrational, as it responds to the logic of coalition management. As Sperber put it:

Moreover, participating in such a collective process involves not just an intellectual but

also – and more surely – a social benefit, that of belonging, of getting recognition as a

person in the know, capable of appreciating the importance of a difficult great thinker.

Not participating, on the other hand, may involve the cost of being marginalised and

of appearing intellectually stale and flat (2010, p. 591).

In the case of the one-sidedness fallacy, the fascist arguer attempts to destroy

facts, claims or information that actually or potentially threaten the coherence and

consistency of his doctrine. In the case of the gossiping fallacies, the attack perpe-

trated by the fascist arguer is explicit against the person, and is an example of what

Bollas calls character assassination. The information spilled all over is indeed dis-

crediting information concerning, for instance, one’s private life, sexual orientation,

and so forth.

Malicious gossip – furiously transmitted by the twenty-first century media – pro-

vides spectators with alleged facts about a certain person, so favoring moral conflicts

and other various situations in which the disengagement of morality can be easily

accomplished.77 Gossip may contribute to rendering the quality of public discourse

and of various moral cognitive niches extremely poor. Although it is not neces-

sarily a degraded form of communication, gossiping can be recognized as one of

the main factors leading to or facilitating the impoverishment of public discourse,

from a moral perspective. It is worth noting here that many citizens may even learn

that gossiping is the only way to be part of public discourse so that they will tend

to reproduce the same impoverished patterns of reasoning (Barnett and Littlejohn,

1997).

In particular, it is also worth mentioning the recourse to a specific form of ad

hominem called poisoning the well (Walton, 2006). In this case, the introduction of

gossiping information – true or false, it does not matter – aims at labeling an entire

category of people as not reliable and therefore to mob or destroy, metaphorically

but also literally, as history tells us. The case cited by Bollas of categorization as

aggression is strictly connected to this version of ad hominem, as the attack is gen-

eralized not only to a person as an individual, but to a person as member of a group

77 See above section 5.1.


which is publicly mobbed and therefore victimized. Usually this attack is followed

and even bolstered by a semantic shift or even change of name.

Consider the following statement made by Daniel L. Abrahamson, a member of

the 9/11 Truth Movement, about Noam Chomsky:78

Noam Chomsky has acted as the premier Left gatekeeper in the aftermath of the 9-11

crimes, lashing out at the 9-11 truth movement and claiming [that] any suggestions

of government complicity are fabrications. The “radical” Chomsky takes a position so

deeply rooted in denial that it makes the staged 9-11 whitewash commission look like

a honest study.

As one can easily see, this is an example of an ad hominem. Abrahamson argued

against what Chomsky claimed about the attack to the Twin Towers saying that the

American linguist and philosopher is a Left gatekeeper, that is, a person who more

or less fraudulently omits to mention certain facts just because they do not fit in

with what he stands for, asserted by the mainstream media. The caricature – made

by means of a personal attack – has two main components worth mentioning here.

First of all, the argument aims at jeopardizing Chomsky’s reputation by labeling him

as Left gatekeeper. This is an example of categorization as aggression. Secondly, it

is a perfect example of what we previously referred to as “a sense of positions in

the field”. That is, the arguer does not really pay attention to the content of his

opponent’s claims. Conversely, he depicts Chomsky as a member of the opposing

coalition that actively takes part in the conflict boosting its own political agenda.

Therefore, everything Chomsky claims is simply irrelevant, as it is interpreted in the

light of military intelligence according to which what really matters is rather why

one says something than what he actually says. This coalition element is captured

by the well-known tagline found in the Gospel of Matthew (12:30): “He who is not

with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me scatters.”

More generally, the systematic recourse to forms of reasoning intimately con-

nected with malicious gossip makes any form of acceptable debate impossible, in

which the principle audi alteram partem is respected. Indeed, the violation of the

principle may easily lead once again to character assassination, as the marginaliza-

tion and annihilation of a certain voice or minority is reached by means of jeopar-

dizing its reputation.

The argumentum ad hominem is one example of gossiping fallacy. The so-called

argumentum ad verecundiam or, in plain English, appeal to authority, is another one.

In the last part of this section I will introduce a special type of ad verecundiam that

I will call appeal to oneself.

The argumentum ad verecundiam is based on the appeal to an authority acknowl-

edged as such in order to support or boost a certain position rather than another.

Consider the following example. Andrew Keen wrote a book, The Cult of Ama-

teur (2007), in which he violently attacks the culture that the Internet and the Web

were (and are still) nurturing. He argues that new technologies, such as blogs, so-

cial networking sites like MySpace, self-broadcasting tools like YouTube, etc., are

78 http://www.modernhistoryproject.org/mhp/

ArticleDisplay.php?Article=NoamAsset.


glorifying and celebrating what he calls the cult of the amateur: that is, through

breaking up all the traditional intermediate layers between the editor and the users,

these new technologies are encouraging everybody to become a source of informa-

tion and entertainment about a certain issue or topic, no matter if he is an expert on

the field he is writing about, or not. Conversely, he claims that a well informed pub-

lic should not rely on amateurs, but talented intermediaries, like professional editors

and journalists, for example. In putting forward his thesis against amateurism, he

made an example, which concerns an eighty-minute movie called Loose Change on

9/11 conspiracy theories which sprang up on the Net some years ago:

The “claims” made by Loose Change were completely discredited in the final report

of the 9/11 Commission, a report that took two years to compile, cost $15 million, and

was written by two governors, four congressmen, three former White House officials,

and the two special counsels (Keen, 2007, p. 69).

In this case, the claim made by Keen is a fallacy based on the appeal to experts.

It is fallacious because he does not reject the theory presented in the movie Loose

Change by referring to evidence and incoherencies; conversely, he simply posits that

the conspiracy theory presented in the movie is false, because the 9/11 Commission

reported quite the contrary. To boost this position, he simply lists some details re-

lated to the report, for example, the cost of the commission, its composition and

duration. Of course, all these details are irrelevant to assess what really happened

that day.

As this brief introduction has shown, an ad verecundiam is usually based on

the recourse to a third party that is supposed and considered as an expert or an

authority in a given field. The appeal to an authority is particularly effective to solve

disagreement, as it may have the same function a judge has in court. Of course, the

authority one appeals to might not be recognized as such by the two parties. In that

case, the function of an ad verecundiam is more rhetorical than dialectical, meaning

that it is not meant to convince one’s opponent, but his audience. For instance, in

a public debate concerning stem cells or abortion a catholic person may appeal to

the Pope to foster his argument thereby widening disagreement with his opponent

while finding favor with the audience.

There is another type of ad verecundiam, which is particularly interesting here:

when a person appeals to himself as the ultimate authority for a certain issue. In this

case, the effect is merely rhetorical and propagandist, as his opponent’s position is

simply rejected because it is not his. In this case, we consider the appeal to oneself

as belonging to the toolbox of the fascist arguer. Let us now make an example.

During a recent press conference, about the upcoming Italian regional elections

of March 2010 in which the PDL (right wing) candidates’ list for Lazio (the region

of Rome) had not been accepted due to formal irregularities, Mr. Berlusconi said:

I want to give a documented and certified reconstruction of what happened, purified

from all the untruthful and biased versions that have been provided by certain press

reports, and I want to say right away that our party executives are in no way what so

ever responsible for what has happened – contrary to what some people have claimed.

From the reconstruction I am going to give now I’ll show you that the PDL candidates

have been intentionally prevented from signing up for the Lazio elections.


After describing what happened according to his reconstruction, he added:

This report is the result of inquiries that I have personally conducted on those people

who were involved in this venture.

His argument can be described as follows:

• It was me doing the inquiry.

• Then, the inquiry is documented and certified.

More generally:

• I say that P is true.

• I am an authority.

• Then, P is true.

As mentioned above, the authority one appeals to is usually a third-party one. For

instance, the Pope, a Nobel laureate, a professor at Harvard University, or even a tool

or a machine (i.e. Google when performing a search). By contrast, in the example of

Mr. Berlusconi, he appeals to himself, not a third-party authority. Now, the question

is: how could it be possible to keep the argumentative force of an ad verecundiam

without recurring to a third-party authority?

One way is to refer to oneself in third person. For example, in the Gospel of John

(9:35-37), Jesus replied as follows to a man who asked him about who the Son of

God is:

You have now seen him; in fact, he is the one speaking with you.

Another example – definitely more prosaic — is provided by the French general

and statesman Charles de Gaulle who wrote this in his memoirs, telling the reader

about the 1958 Algiers uprisings:

No one really doubted that the situation could have any other conclusion than De

Gaulle.

These two very simple examples are meant for pointing out how sometimes one

needs to stage himself as an authority. Now, what I want to stress here is that one can

do that even without explicitly resorting to the third person. In fact, what is needed

is the recourse to the “virtual self”, as Goffman (1961) put it. According to his

definition, the idea of the virtual self describes the expectations about the character

a person is supposed to have playing a given role. So, one is who he is, and who he

is supposed to be – when playing a given role in society.

In the example of Mr. Berlusconi, he remarked that it was him doing the inquiry.

What did he mean by that? When stressing that it was him who conducted the in-

quiry, he was staging his virtual self aiming to convey the impression to the audience

that he was the ultimate authority over the matter in discussion. In doing so, he was

involved in what Goffman called the process of “role distance” (1961). Originally,


Goffman used that expression to refer to all those cases in which a person dis-

tances himself (or who he actually is) from the role he has been assigned to in

a given context. The concepts of the virtual self and that of role distance are of

particular help here: I argue that in our example what Berlusconi is appealing to

is – in Goffman’s terminology – his virtual self or the role he plays, rather than

himself. So, the process of role distance provides a valuable account about how

the shift from a third-party authority to a first-person authority can actually take

place. That is, my take is that it is only the process of shifting as distancing that al-

lows the appeal to oneself to keep the argumentative force of the ad verecundiam it

mimics.

It is worth pointing out that the shift is meant to create a fictional recourse to a

third-party authority. At a pragmatical level, it is basically a person appealing to his

say-so and nothing more. I posit that this is what characterizes the appeal to oneself

as belonging to the fascist’s toolbox, because any opposing view can be ruled out

by resorting to one’s say-so. The opponent is deprived of any possibility to have his

say fairly discussed or analyzed simply on the basis that he is a priori on the wrong

side. Indeed, the fascist dimension of the appeal to oneself is strengthened, or at

least becomes more effective, as it reflects a power asymmetry between the arguers.

In order to make this point clearer, let me go back to Goffman’s idea of the virtual

self. As one can easily see, in the appeal to oneself, the recourse to one’s virtual self

should be convincing. Otherwise, the appeal would miss the target and blow back,

resulting merely pathetic. Of course, the way one’s virtual self is depicted or staged

is not totally at one’s will. By contrast, it is a social phenomenon related to power.

As far as I am concerned here a distinction should be made.

Walton (1997, p. 77-78) argued that there are two different types of authority: the

cognitive authority and the administrative authority. In the first case, the recourse

to authority is meant for cognitive purposes. For instance, patients trust their doctor

because she is supposed to be an expert, able to read symptoms and prescribe the

most effective treatment to solve the problem (i.e. treat the disease). The second type

of authority – the administrative one – is usually a person that has a right to exercise

command or influence. For instance, an official or a person holding a recognized

position of power.

The fascist arguer usually relies on the second type of authority depicting him-

self not as an expert, but somebody that has a certain authority which is not derived

from what he knows, but from his recognized position of power – his virtual self

to use Goffman’s terminology. He takes himself as an authority to exert force. So,

basically, the fascist arguer is implicitly using his own power to make his statement

credible so that to disagree with his view or simply to refute it would mean to ques-

tion his power and more or less tacitly engage him in battle. This process is once

again related to military intelligence and coalition management as I have previously

contended. That is, a coalition-enforcing dimension is explicitly addressed so that

agreeing or disagreeing is no longer related to the reasonableness of a certain argu-

ment or belief, but to a sense of positions in the field.

5.5 The Perversity of “Respecting People as Things” 231

5.5 The Perversity of “Respecting People as Things” in Wars

and the Role of Bad Faith

When exploring the problem of violent (but held as moral by their performers) eco-

tage and monkey-wrenching in chapter one of my book Morality in a Technolog-

ical World (Magnani, 2007b) – and in chapter four of this book – I emphasized

the urgency of defining some “things” as distributed “moral mediators” that can

provide precious ethical information which is unattainable through existing inter-

nal mental resources and thus ascribe important new values to human beings that

could not otherwise be ascribed. In the case of ecotage we face with an analo-

gous strongly moral (and at the same time violent) process of “respecting plants

as humans”: indeed I observed that, in radical environmentalism, ecotage is seen

as a way of defending minorities. Unprotected vegetable and animal species that

are being destroyed are considered, in this construct, minorities with the same dig-

nity as human minority groups. Moreover, if the self is ecologically extended, as

many scholars contend, and it is part of a larger ecological self that comprises the

whole biological community, then the defense of non human “things” is simply

“self-defense”. Consequently, breaking the law is justifiable for some eco-violent

activists.

A similar line of thinking can help us to reframe our understanding of modern

warfare and the threat it poses to nonmilitary entities. In some contemporary wars

waged by Western countries, military forces have systematically violently destroyed

ill-fated sets of local things, animals, and human beings, all of which have no de-

fenses of their own and are rarely regarded by the local leaders as worthy of pro-

tection. Paradoxically, they appear on the world’s moral radar screen only because

of the ethical value they acquire after being destroyed. Perversely, dead bodies and

bombed-out buildings have a particular kind of worth that is unavailable to living

people and unscathed cities.

I contend that the traditional ethics of war has not paid sufficient conceptual and

strategic attention to the problem of noncombatant immunity. This lapse has oc-

curred, I believe, because a distorted way of “respecting people as things” has led

us into assigning exaggerated ethical and pedagogical value to the violent specta-

cle of dead bodies and destroyed objects. Ironically, in a war setting human beings

are morally “respected” as people only when they become nonliving things – that

is, when they are dead – just as certain animals or sites gain value when they be-

come extinct or are violently destroyed. This respect for violently terminated non-

combatant humans echoes the paroxysm of violence in sacrificial-religious-victimary

processes.79 In a way, so-called smart bombs seek to minimize this bizarre “respect

for people as things” (that we could label as a respect for people when things) by

targeting only military sites and limiting civilian casualties.

79 Again, cf. Girard’s seminal work on this subject (1977), already illustrated in the previous

chapters of this book.


I am not concerned here with the concept of just war or the question of “when

to fight”;80 rather, I would like to focus on the problem of “how to fight” by revisit-

ing the concept of “respecting people as things”, I described in subsection 4.4.2 of

the previous chapter. The generally accepted principle of noncombatant immunity

is that civilian life and property should not be subjected to military force, but there

are conflicting ideas about what counts as “civilian” and what counts as “military”.

I believe that we can consider unprotected things, animals, and human beings that

are threatened by warfare “also” to be minorities, just as environmentalists consider

endangered plants and animals to be minorities; this status would give them non-

combatant immunity and accord them protection. The problem of “how to fight”

would, consequently, acquire new variables and moral nuances and so help us to

recalibrate the current ethics of war.

Those who refuse to acknowledge the reality of collateral damage regress into

a sort of psychological refuge from the horrors of war; they find relief in such de-

nial, but it also leads them to violently underestimate the problem of noncombatant

immunity. This brings us back to the issue of bad faith: building an emotional fire-

wall is a way for an individual to construct another self, one less sensitive to the

horrors of war in this precise case. War violently kills human beings, and this fact

is too horrific for some people to accept when faced with it; such people – politi-

cians, sometimes – prefer to indulge in bad faith rather than sorting through all the

complexities of war. By so doing, they maintain their ignorance about the problem

of noncombatant immunity, and it is this ignorance that contributes to perpetuate

human anguish and violence. In turn, more human suffering drives more people to

the opiate comfort of the condition of bad faith, and the cycle continues unchecked.

Moreover, convincing oneself that collateral damage is unlikely (or, worse, ac-

ceptable) contributes to an objective ideology about war that is available “out there”,

stored in external devices and supports (other people, books, media, etc.) of a given

social collective. People readily pick up external ideological “tools” of this kind,

then re-represent them internally in order to preserve their bad faith. The condition

of bad faith may be so widespread in a cultural collective that it becomes crystal-

lized in ideological narratives shared by entire communities. Bad faith becomes,

in essence, a cultural default setting. Only by continually monitoring the links be-

tween the internal and external world we can lay bare the deceptive nature of our

beliefs. This process testifies to the continuous interplay between the internal and

external environment, and I think it can fittingly illustrate the deceptive character of

the various ideologies.

Wars compel cultures to acknowledge that they attribute greater value and respect

to tanks and technological weapons (and the all-encompassing commodification of

human needs) than to an intact natural community of living plants, animals, and

human beings. Considering how entrenched many old ideas are, making the case

80 A complete treatment of the ethics of war and peace is given in (Lackey, 1989) and, more

recently, in (Coady, 2008). For an analysis of war as a complex interaction process, in-

volving moral aspects which provide its legitimation, despite modernity’s emphasis on

interstate peace and cooperation, but also “immoral” aspects, when seen in the light of the

dehumanization of the “other” and in the prohibition against killing, cf. (Tiryakian, 2010).

5.5 The Perversity of “Respecting People as Things” 233

for new kinds of war or nonmilitary strategies to achieve prosperity and freedom is

a considerable challenge indeed. Respecting people as things is important not only

in order to ascribe greater value to others but also for preserving our own dignity and

freedom. As I contend, embracing this – at first sight – un-Kantian concept requires

that we develop new ways of thinking and new kinds of knowledge: if we fail to

do so, one of the negative consequences is that we put ourselves at greater risk of

stumbling into bad faith.

To live without important knowledge – whether we have stubbornly resisted it or

we are just unaware of it – results in creating for ourselves a toxic state of ignorance

that generates a vague sense of anxiety, which, I contend, is what drives us into

the bad faith condition and, in our present case, neutrality with respect to violence

against noncombatants. We wriggle away from unpleasantness and retreat into a

kind of oblivion that just seems less harmful than confronting difficult issues. Bad

faith ultimately has a deeply corrosive effect on our well-being, for being ignorant

of possible choices constricts our freedom and diminishes our dignity.

But this invisible condition is so pervasive, so much a part of life in the mod-

ern world, that it is not easy to imagine how to rise above it. Bad faith may be a

self-defeating coping mechanism, but it is, for many people, the best (or only) one

available. My answer is to supplant it with knowledge: that which seems unbear-

able or impossible can often, when one has the right information, be approached

differently and managed, if not easily, then at least more comfortably. Here we re-

turn to the challenge of building new forms of knowledge (and of moral knowledge)

that, once developed, must be used wisely and purposefully. Acquiring a new under-

standing of science, technology, and ourselves is critical, but it does not complete

our quest to enhance human dignity. Once we have this new awareness, we face the

practical matter of putting it to use. Therefore, the most important and difficult step

in the process is to identify the principles that will guide us and to develop reason-

ing strategies that will lead us to the best possible choices. I have never meant to be

naıve and consider knowledge as the ultimate tension-solver: as a matter of fact, I

have stressed throughout this book how even the most rational knowledge content

can become a trigger for violent outcomes.

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Multiple Individual Moralities May Trigger Violence